Empirical studies of the content of the representations about marriage partner among students of pedagogical Universities

Abstract

The article examines the methodology and results of research carried out to study the particularities of students’ representations about their marriage partner.

The authors have studied content and structural particularities of these representations. The choice of sampling, psycho diagnostic instruments and processing methods of empirical data are well justified. The images and characteristics revealed are used as an empirical material. We applied the method of semantic differential. The received data were also exposed to factor analysis that let discover three semantic lines in respondents’ representation structure of the marriage partner: personality traits, business qualities and appearance. It was ascertained that the students of pedagogical university have difficul- ties to build the adequate image of the marriage partner, the parameters of father’s image are similar to image characteristics of the marriage partner.

The young girls from complete families, creating the image of the marriage partner set semantic accents with reference to qualities, reflecting interpersonal contacts, but the girls from single-parent family do it with reference to business qualities of the partner and ignore the qualities reflecting positive attitudes to the wife. The indices of deficient repre- sentations about the marriage partner typical for the students from incomplete families were discovered. We also examined their negative impact upon marriage relations. We suggest a model of psychological support to young girls who suffer from difficulties and can’t achieve self-realization in the field of marriage relations.