BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE: During studentship, marriage can promulgate and internalize simple life and easy marriage culture among young adults, especially university students. In spite of the importance of this subject, university students, especially students of medical sciences universities, face many more barriers and problems on their way of marriage. Therefore, the aim of this study was to determine university students' attitudes toward the marriage problems during studentship.
METHODS: This analytical-descriptive and cross-sectional study was conducted on 400 students of Mashhad University of Medical Sciences, selected using clustering –classifying method. Data were collected using a researcher-made questionnaire including 16 questions which measured students' marriage problems during studentship. The validity of this questionnaire was approved by professors of Mashhad University of Medical Sciences and Faculty of Educational Sciences in Ferdowsi University, and its reliability was approved by test – retest and internal parallelism method.
FINDINGS: The findings revealed that the most important marriage problems in studentship period, according to students' point of view, included lack of students' independence-of-thought in selecting their future spouse (54.6%), their economic status (48.2%), and the scare of cultural incompatibility (44.5%), respectively. On the other hand, factors like non-educational activities (11.2%), parents' inclination on family marriage (13.8%), also emphasis of parents on traditional marriage (0.16%) had the least effect on unwillingness to marry during studentship, respectively.
CONCLUSION: Since independence-of-thought on marriage, and economical and welfare issues is of great importance for university students, it is suggested that the managers and decision makers for maintaining and improving the students' health should provide a background to make marriage easier by considering cultural, religious and social criteria.