Nowadays women became much more independent, they don’t want to sit at home, doing all the housework- women prefer to go out to work, be able to earn money. As the marriage is no more reliable, women started consider their future where they can rely only on themselves and so planning to be able to support themselves. “Marriage today is more likely to be based on love and companionship rather than the custom and financial necessity of the past.” At the same time feminists argue that women being more aware that they are exploited in the nuclear family, and their role in the house is still to look after the family and home, work and deal with all the emotional problems arising in the family, basically doing triple shift, while male is dominant. There is a relative inequality within a marriage. This idea repeals most of the women from getting married.
More and more couples cohabitate nowadays-they just live together without getting married. It used to be unacceptable and was called “living in sin”, but now this disapproval has been weakened. Lots of cohabitating relationships do lead to marriage, so it’s not rejected- it’s delayed in most of the cases.
Divorce doesn’t seem deviant anymore and it became a lot easier and cheaper. Divorce no longer means shame and social disapproval “equalising the grounds for divorce between the sexes, widening the ground for divorce, making divorce cheaper.” Now couples get married knowing that if the marriage will go wrong they can easily divorce. People put their own happiness first.
Stigma is s negative label or something that society is disapproved of. In the past divorce was seemed as deviance as well as not to get married. Now this is more socially acceptable and the fact that there is more freedom it reduces the stigma attached to it. Stigma to alternatives to marriage is declining as well. Cohabitation, remarrying, having children outside marriage is now totally acceptable and pregnancy often doesn’t lead to a marriage. “Seventy per cent of those interviewed for the British Social Attitudes Survey in 1989 believed that couples who want children should get married, but by 2000 only 54% thought so.” As the divorce rate is rising people may be put off as they see that a marriage is now more likely to end in divorce. There is a growing fear of a failure while most of the people still hoping to find a perfect partner for life.
As people are more concentrate on their career, spending longer on full time education and determination to get independency, most of them postpone marriage. Nowadays the average age for getting married has grown.
Methodology
I am going to use questionnaires for my survey, because I think that this is the best way to search for information as it is simple, quick to collect and easy to analyse. The other methods I could use are face to face interviews, observation etc, but I consider that in my case the questionnaires will be the best way. Advantages of using a self-completion questionnaire are that there few costs as I won’t need interviewers; my response rate will be high; the results are going to be easy to compare; it less time consuming.
As I mentioned in my introduction I am going to find out what young people think about marriage nowadays. So my sample is going to be a quota sample (this is when you are choosing people for your research with certain characteristics) - young boy and girls aged 16-22. I will ask people from the Filton College as the majority of students are the age I am aiming at. The number of people will be 20, 10 of them girls and 10 boys.
My responders will be given a list of questions appropriate to the target of my research. Because everyone answers the same questions in the same order, the results are going to be easy to compare. I will use a mixture of closed and opened questions.
I am aiming at a high response rate as my questionnaire will take maximum 3 minutes to complete, easy to read and understand and I am going to be there when the questions will be answered so I can answer people’s questions if needed.
To ensure that my methods will succeed I decided to do a pilot study first. I will test these questions on a very small amount of responders and see if there are any problems at all. I am going to ask 4 people and analyse the data.
Analyses
I have asked 10 boys and 10 girls aged 16-22 about their opinion about marriage. I have analysed their answers.
My first question was about whether the respondent married or not and everyone chose the answer “no” which shows as that young people prefer not to get married at the early age.
From the results we can clearly see that most of the young people are planning to get married at the age of between 23-30 (15 from 20; 75%), only few of them chose the answers 31-35 and 18-22 and only one chose not to marry at all. First of all this is showing that most of the young people do plan to get married. Secondly, the age they chose is quite early and that is not what sociologists tell us in their statistics. The difference is that they take into account actual marriages that happened, and my research is about what young people want to do in the future. Culture is always changing, so do the opinions of the people.
In the question about opinion why people get married less nowadays the answers vary. Still most of the people think that it is career that goes first before marriage, that people want success and independency and should get good qualification to support the family. The less percentage thinks that is all about people being afraid to fail or not being able to find a perfect partner. From that we can say that people choose their career first to make sure they will be able to support the family. This confirms one of the reason of people choosing not to marry I mentioned in my content earlier.
Almost everyone in my question about whether all people should get married answered that people should choose what is the best for them, and that it should be up to an individual to decide. We can see that marriage in young people opinions is more about choice, they have freedom to choose whether to marry or not. The reasons as I said in my content are that there are fewer stigmas to not getting married, alternatives of marriages and divorce as well as secularisation.
In the question about whether marriage is for life or not there are half of people who think that it is not and the other half that thinks that once you got married you should try to make it work. The reasons why it is not were that people get tired of each other soon; sometimes they have problems that they can’t deal with; people change over period of time etc. Other youngsters thought that if you truly love someone you won’t want to get divorced; that the marriage is the only way to have a happy family; when you marry you commit to the vows you speak etc. Still people are hoping to have a happy family and a marriage for life.
My last question was about religion whether or not it affects people’s attitudes to marriage. As a result most of the people (about 3/4) answered that it doesn’t. The reasons were that they don’t care what other think; that they are not religious and don’t believe in God. People who said that religion does affect their attitudes are religious and believe that it will make their marriage even more reliable. The fact that there were more people who were not religious confirms one of the reasons why marriage is less popular.
Evaluation
Through my research I found out about attitudes of young people to marriages and the reasons for their opinions. I have investigated different aspects of influence from the society on youngsters in the 21st century.
The marriage is still popular in Britain, as almost everyone answered that they are going to marry at some point in their life. However, the social role and meaning of marriage has changed. As we can see from my content the reasons are mainly because of the freedom of choice, means that every individual now is free to decide what he or she wants to do with his/her life. Religion doesn’t affect people’s choice as much as it did in the past. Women don’t need as much support as they became more independent and being able to support themselves. Probably one of the main reasons is that the stigma attached to alternatives of marriage is in decline. It became normal in our society not to get married, as the way you live is about your choice. From the answers of my responders we can see that most of them first would like to get some qualification first, putting success and independency in front.
As we can see that there is a secularisation, some people do believe in God, but they are not influenced by it.
The method I used to research was questionnaires. I chose this method, because questionnaires are more objective, certainly more than interviews.
Questionnaires are familiar to most people. Nearly everyone has had some experience completing questionnaires and they generally do not make people apprehensive. Questionnaires reduce bias. The researcher's own opinions will not influence the respondent to answer questions in a certain manner. There are no verbal or visual clues to influence the respondent. Questionnaires are less intrusive than telephone or face-to-face surveys. My questionnaires were anonymous, so people being sure that their names are not going to be on the list were not afraid to tell the truth. The weaknesses were that some people found it not essential to explain their answers where they were asked to, and I could not come back to them as all questionnaires were anonymous. Some people might not tell the truth maybe finding questions about their plan too personal. Sometimes there were some problems with reading people handwriting. My sample was 20 people and the answers do not represent the whole country as everyone is different and the rest of the people might think in completely different way.
Bibliography
1) “Sociology in focus” Paul Taylor, John Richardson, Alan Yeo; 1996; published by the Bath Press; p266
2) “The contemporary British Society” Nicholas Abercrombie and Alan Warde; 2001; Polity Press; p147
3) “Sociology” second edition; Fulcher and Scott; 2003; Oxford; p466
4) “Active Sociology for GCSE”; Jonathan Blundell; 2001; Longman; p142
5) http://www.oneplusone.org.uk/marriedornot/PDF/ChangingMarriage.pdf
