Investigating the Relationship of Forgiveness and Religious Orientation to Marital Conflict

Since marital conflicts have numerous destructive effects on the family and mental and even physical health of the people in community, it is necessary to know the factors that affect it. Therefore, the present study was an attempt to investigate the relationship of forgiveness and intrinsic and extrinsic religious orientation with marital conflicts.

This study is correlational and the statistical population consists of married teachers with children from Qom, who were taking part in an in-service training program in the summer of 2016. Out of them, 224 participants were selected based on Morgan’s table by simple random sampling. The participants were evaluated using Alport’s religious orientation, Rye’s forgiveness and Barati and Sanaei’s marital conflict questionnaires. Data were analyzed by Pearson correlation test and multiple regression with backward method. In this study, all the ethical considerations have been observed and no conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

The results showed that marital conflicts had a significantly negative relationship with forgiveness and intrinsic religious orientation. There was no significant relationship, however, between marital conflicts and extrinsic religious orientation.

Based the findings, it can be concluded that paying attention to the couple’s religious orientation and teaching forgiveness skills will play an important role in reducing marital conflicts.