Identifying the Basic Criteria of Spouse Selection as Protective Factors Against Dissatisfaction and Divorce in Couples based on Lived Experience of Family Psychologists and Consultants

Formation of family and marriage as one of the most important stages during each person's life, begins with selecting a spouse, so success and satisfaction in other stages of life depend on the correct decision and the conscious choice in this stage. Marriage shares a life with another person who has different criteria and expectations. This choice plays an important role in forming the foundation of the family and couples' marital satisfaction and achievement, as well as family dissatisfaction and the tendency to divorce in couples. Personality traits, family, culture, and community attitudes towards life and environment are important factors in this selection. The expanded assessment aspects and a lack of clear criteria for achieving a comprehensive understanding of the partner are part of people's problems in selecting a spouse. This study aimed to achieve important elements in selecting a spouse as protective factors against marital dissatisfaction and Divorce based on Iranian culture and from the perspective of family psychologists and consultants.

In this study, which was performed with a phenomenological method, two groups of samples including specialists in family and marriage and a panel group of university teachers and students were used. In the qualitative phase, according to the purpose of accessing the experience of experts in the subject of study, counselors, and psychologists in the field of family and marriage in Yazd City that wanted to participate were used. Purposive sampling was used to select the sample group. The sample size in qualitative studies continues until the researcher is fully saturated with the information, i.e., until a new code of interviews is not extracted and the information obtained is duplicated, so in this study, the sample was continued until complete data saturation by 16 interviews. After conducting semi–structured interviews with the first group, interviews were analyzed to examine the participants' experience of the subject. In the next stage, using Colaizzi's method (1978), the main subthemes and themes were extracted. In the quantitative phase, a panel of ten professors and senior undergraduate psychology and counseling students at the Islamic Azad University of Yazd were used by random sampling method to determine the validity of the categories obtained. To evaluate the content validity, two qualitative and quantitative methods were used to the viewpoint of experts on the level of coordination with the themes. The research data was validated according to four criteria of reliability provided by Guba & Lincoln (1989). To measure the validity of the data, a panel group was used to assess the validity by the content validity method. In the next step, by referring to the Lawsche table, validation was done for ten participants with a coefficient of 0.6 as the critical point and necessity of the class.

After analyzing interviews and understanding participants' experience with the Colaizzi method, 397 codes, 52 secondary themes and seven main themes were concluded. The seven main themes included personality traits, history of family growth, expression of love and emotions, spirituality and religious expectations, management of finance, conflict and resolve, and family customs identified as the main components and criteria of youth in choosing a spouse. The main categories of "personality traits", "management of financial and economic affairs", and "family and customs", with the frequency of 10, 10 and 9, respectively, from the perspective of experts in the interview, were more important. All seven main categories achieved an acceptable content validity score.

Identifying and determining the basic criteria of choosing a spouse in marriage while helping to make conscious choices that increasing marital satisfaction can strengthen the family foundation and prevent Divorce in life.