The relationship between attitudes toward singlehood, marital relationship beliefs and loneliness

This study was to examine the relationship between attitudes toward singlehood (ATS), marital relationship beliefs (MRB), and loneliness in single individuals. The ATS Scale was firstly developed within the scope of the study. The study was conducted with 1,215 single volunteers over 18 years of age accessed by the convenience sampling method while developing the scale (N=675) and analyzing the relationship between the variables (N=540). ATS Scale, MRB Scale, UCLA Loneliness Scale, and Personal Information Form were used in the study. The exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were used in data analysis to determine the construct validity of the ATS Scale, while the Pearson correlation coefficient, Multiple Regression Analysis and ANOVA were used to determine the relationships between variables. The findings indicated a low-negative statistically significant relationship between marital relationship beliefs (MRB) and attitudes toward singlehood (ATS), a low-positive one between marital relationship beliefs (MRB) and Loneliness, and no significant relationship between attitudes toward singlehood (ATS) and Loneliness. Consequently, the MRA that root family dependency and I-we balance, which are the subscales of the MRB scale, predicted the attitudes toward singlehood in a statistically significant way, while loneliness, sexual life, and emotion management didn't significantly predict the attitudes towards singlehood. 11% of the change in attitudes toward singlehood was explained with the variables included in the created model. Emotion management was significantly higher in women, while the I-we balance scores were significantly higher in men. The emotional scores of those who currently had a romantic relationship toward singlehood were higher than those who didn't have a relationship. The loneliness levels of single individuals who had never had a romantic relationship were the highest. The MRB of those who were currently in a romantic relationship were the lowest. Those who spent their lives in villages/towns for a long time had lower mean scores in the dimension of emotions toward singlehood compared to the ones in districts/metropolitan cities. The findings were discussed in line with the literature and suggestions were offered for researchers.