Research of the relationship between marriage anxiety of unmarried individuals, the meaning they attributed to marriage and their marriage expectations

In this study, it was aimed to examine the relationship between marital anxiety, the meaning of marriage and marriage expectations of unmarried individuals. The research was carried out with the relational scanning model, one of the quantitative research methods. The research was carried out with a total of 454 participants, 322 women and 132 men, aged between 18-25. In this study, Marriage Anxiety Scale (MAS) developed by Çelik and Erkilet (2019) to determine the marital anxiety levels of unmarried individuals, and The Scale of the Meaning of Marriage (SMM) developed by Özabacı, Körük and Kara (2018) to determine the positive-negative meaning levels they attribute to marriage, Marriage Expectation Scale (MES) developed by Jones and Nelson (1996) and adapted into Turkish by Öz Soysal et al. (2016), and sociodemographic data form prepared by the researcher were used. Data collection tools were delivered to participants online. With the data obtained in this study Independent Groups t-test, Pearson Correlation and Multiple Linear Regression analyzes were performed. The analysis of the data was done with the SPSS (25) package program. The findings showed that the participants' marital anxiety scores, marriage expectation scores and positive-negative significance scores they attributed to marriage were significantly correlated with each other. At the same time, the finding of the multiple linear regression analysis is that the marriage expectation scores and scores attributed to the meaning of marriage explain 27.7% of the marriage anxiety scores. Finally, the results of the research were discussed with the relevant literature, and recommendations were made for future researchers.