Evaluation of the relationship between youth attitudes towards marriage and motivation for childbearing

It is known that the oldest and smallest social structure of human beings, which has been a social entity throughout history, is the family. Although there may be different opinions all over the world, marriage is seen as a cultural necessity in order to establish family unity. In this study, we aimed to determine the relationship between motivations of youth, that are among the cultural inheritors, for marriage and childbearing. This descriptive and correlational study was conducted with 820 midwifery and nursing students who attend Van Yuzuncu Yil University, Van Health High School in 2019–2020 fall semester. Data were collected through Student Information Form, Inonu Marriage Attitude Scale (I-MAS) and Childbearing Motivations Scale (CMS) and the data obtained were examined with descriptive statistics, Mann-Whitney U test, Kruskal Wallis Test, Pearson's Correlation and simple linear regression analysis. The mean age of the patients was 21.415 ± 1.593 (min = 18, max = 26) years, 73.4% were female and almost all of them (99.6%) have not been married before. It was found that the students have positive attitudes towards marriage with high scores they received from I-MAS (73.312 ± 18.323). It was determined that decisions of the studies who reported positive opinion about childbearing were influenced by personal satisfaction level, childbearing burden and immaturity before birth, experiencing marriage stress and negative financial predictions for future. There was a positive moderate (r = 0.675, p < 0.001) correlation between attitudes of the students towards marriage and motivations of childbearing, and a positive weak correlation between attitudes of the students towards marriage and negative motivations of childbearing (r = 0.239, p = 0.000). It was found that youth generally have positive attitudes towards marriage and childbearing, but socioeconomic factors may have negative effects on the decisions made for future. For this purpose, it can be recommended that public policies should be regulated in terms of marriage and childbearing, and young people with negative opinions should be referred to marriage and family counseling centers.