Developing awareness scale about expectations from romantic relationships and determining the awareness of university students' expectations from romantic relationships

This research has two main objectives. The primary purpose of the research is to develop a valid and reliable scale aimed at measuring the awareness of university students about their expectations from romantic relationships. The second aim of the study is to examine the awareness of university students about their expectations from romantic relationships according to demographic variables. Within the scope of the scale development study, a total of 1727 university students, including the third and fourth grade students attending the 2018-2019 academic year, were conducted with 454 university students in order to examine the expectations according to various demographic variables. Within the scope of the study, the Awareness Scale on Expectations from Romantic Relationships and the Irrational Beliefs Scale in Romantic Relations were used. Test-retest reliability and Cronbach Alpha Coefficients calculations were used to calculate the reliability of the developed scale. For the content validity of the scale, the literature was examined, the scale items were written and expert opinion was consulted. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyzes were performed for construct validity studies. Within the scope of similar scales validity, Pearson Correlation Coefficient was used. In the second stage of the research, the awareness of university students about their expectations from romantic relationships was examined according to some demographic variables. Data analyzes were carried out using SPSS 24 and AMOS 22 package programs. As a result of the analysis of the data of the first stage of the research, the scale consisting of 30 items and 5 subdimensions (trust expectation, relationship quality expectation, cultural expectations, self-control expectation, physical expectations) was obtained. In the second stage of the study, independent groups t-test, kruskal Wallis h-test, mann whitney u-test, oneway MANOVA test and multivariate ANOVA test were used to examine the data. As a result of the ANOVA test, significant differences were seen between the groups and LSD post hoc test was applied to understand the source of the difference. Significant differences were found in the expectations scores of students from romantic relationships in terms of gender, faculty, department, grade level, romantic relationship status, perceived economic situation and the way of meeting romantic spouse. No significant difference was found between students' awareness of their expectations from romantic relationships according to their ages, the region they came to university and their romantic relationship time.