Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
SIRNAK UNIVERSITY JOURNAL OF DIVINITY FACULTY, sa.32, ss.187-218, 2023 (ESCI)
Along with the process of industrialization, the emergence of women in the workforce and their presence in the public sphere has fundamentally changed traditional family values and lifestyles. The extent of this change is even greater in modern societies where the influence of tradition and religion is minimal. This research aims to examine university students' views on women's freedom, partner selection, marriage preferences, and extramarital relationships, and whether these attitudes vary by gender, educational background, type of high school attended, family's religious life, and place of residence during their university years. The study was designed as a cross-sectional, quantitative, and descriptive study. The total sample of 989 participants was selected using a stratified random sampling method based on different academic departments at Ataturk University. The participants included university students from seven different academic departments, with 63.4% being female. The majority of students were graduates of Anatolian and Imam Hatip High Schools, and 47.7% of students lived in dormitories belonging to the Credit and Dormitories Institution. When looking at the degree of religiosity in their families, 73% of students described their families as religious. According to the research results, the participating university students prefer religious and legal marriages, have a significantly negative view of extramarital relationships, consider religiosity an important criterion in partner selection, and believe that women should be as free as men to a rate of 50%. Moreover, variables such as gender, educational background, and high school type lead to differences in these views. In particular, religion plays an important role in the preference for marriage types and views on extramarital relationships. It is noteworthy that students majoring in theology, those who attended Imam Hatip High School, and those who described their families as very religious had a higher preference for religious and legal marriages compared to other groups. Similarly, this group of students had a highly negative view of extramarital relationships compared to other groups. Additionally, almost all students majoring in religious studies (90.4%) preferred their future partners to be religious. In terms of women's freedom, the lowest participation rate (13.9%) in the idea that women should be as free as men was found among students majoring in religious studies, while graduates of Imam Hatip had a participation rate of 28.1%. All of these data can be interpreted in four ways. Firstly, it shows how deeply rooted and established religious marriage is in even the most open-minded, thinking, and questioning segment of society -university students. Secondly, it highlights the significant differences in attitudes towards extramarital relationships and partner selection criteria among different groups of students based on their educational background and family religious life. Thirdly, it shows the continuing importance of religion in shaping people's attitudes towards marriage and women's rights in a modern society. Lastly, it underlines the need for further research to better understand the relationship between religion, tradition, and modernization in contemporary Turkish society.