A Study of the Relationship Between Dynamics of Female Identity and Marital Conflicts (Research Field: The City of Yazd)

According to many scholars, with the widespread socio-cultural changes of recent decades, Identities have evolved on the border of tradition and modernity and fundamental changes are created in relationships, beliefs and expectations of the marriage and marital lives. Continuous reflection on women’s identity, the inseparable processes of presence in community and education, questioned the traditional structure of the family, which was largely based on gender differences, and caused difficulty in coordinating traditional roles with new family-personal roles. Based on this, the present study seeks to understand that what are the dynamics of women’s identity in the religious and traditional city of Yazd and what role they play in marital conflicts?
The method in this study is survey. The sample consisted of all married women in 20 to 55 years of age with children in Yazd. The sampling method was multi-stage cluster sampling method. Thus, at first three Yazd Municipality areas were considered as three main clusters, and in the next step, the main streets of each area of the municipality were considered as districts for clusters. In the final step, using a simple random method and visiting the homes, the respondents were recruited to be 394 individuals. The tool used in this study was a questionnaire. The questionnaire after validation and its reliability in the preliminary stages of the research, was used to collect the required data at the final stage. Content validity has been used in this research. Cronbach’s alpha has also been used to measure instrument reliability. The marital conflicts variable was measured with 0/94 alpha in the form of Likert scale. Also, the Female Identity Dynamic variable was measured with 0/90 alpha in the form of Likert scale.
Discussion of Results & The results of this study show that marital conflicts among women of Yazd are less than average, 65% have a low conflict, 29% have middle-range conflict and 6% have high conflict. Overall, it can be expressed that 35% of women with a middle to high conflict are a significant percentage and it needs attention and consideration to reduce its negative effects in marital life. Also, most conflicts exist in the aspects of communicational conflicts with a mean of 14/88, finance with a mean of 10/53, and parenting with a mean of 9/82. Also, 19.3% of women have a traditional identity, 68% have an intermediate identity and 11.7% of them have a modern identity. The results of the present research confirm that the intermediate identity of Yazdi women is neither in fact entirely traditional nor completely modern. This result also affirms that women in Yazd depart from their traditional identity, while their modern identity is strengthened and this factor lead to conflicts in their family backgrounds. The data show that there is a significant relationship between the two variables of the female identity and marital conflicts. And with more dynamics of women’s identity from traditional to modern, marital conflicts increase. In the three dimensions of women’s identity, data also indicate that gender, role, and personal identity have a positive and meaningful relationship with marital conflicts. The possible reason for this is that the family in Yazd did not change with the changes in the identity of women, causing conflicts in women’s marital life. The research results also show that marital conflict is reduced with increasing educational level. Marital conflicts of employed women is more than non-employed women. The results of the analysis of structural equations for assessing the research model show that the research model has generally a good fit.