On the Relationship Between Meaning in Life and Quality of Sexual Life Among Married Students of Mazandaran University of Medical Sciences and their Spouses in 2023

The quality of sexual life is one of the important branches of the quality of life and it is a means to examine the relationship between sexual problems and the quality of life. The meaning of life is also one of the indicators affecting the quality of life. Among the country's population, students are exposed to questions about the meaning of life due to being in a period of youth transformation. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the relationship between the meaning in life and the quality of sexual life of married students of Mazandaran University of Medical Sciences and their spouses in 2023.

In this cross-sectional descriptive-analytical study, after being approved by the ethics committee with code IR.MAZUMS.REC.1401.17162, 185 couples of married students of Mazandaran University of Medical Sciences and their spouses were included in the study in May and June 2023 with two stages stratified sampling method with proportional allocation. First, married students of each faculty was determined then participants were included with convenience method. Inclusion criteria were willingness to participate, being Iranian, being married, having a surviving spouse, and Monogamy, while exclusion criteria was unwillingness of the spouse to complete the questionnaire. They completed questionnaires on the Quality of sexual life, the Meaning in life, DASS-21, socio-economic status, and demographic-medical-psychological information form made by the researcher. SPSS 25 software and Pearson correlation coefficient, independent two-sample t-test, one-way ANOVA, and mixed model linear regression with Backward model were used. The drop rate was 20% and the significance level was P<0.05.

The response rate in this study was 87.2%. The average age of men is 31.88±7.87 and women is 28.81±8.34. The average score of the quality of sexual life of men and women in the study was 59.25±8.54 and 93.60±15.05. According to the paired t-test, the score of the quality of sexual life of men is 6.15±2.53 units higher and significant (P<0.001). According to mixed linear regression with the Backward model, there is a significant relationship between the quality of sexual life of couples with a marriage duration (6-10 years (r= -14.69) and 11-15 years (r= -19.08), place of living with family in the city (r=18.76) and village (r=27.43)), lack of privacy (r= -28.29), owning a residential house (r=7.64), not suffering from physical illness (r=15.09) and psychiatric illness (r=15.04), infertility (r= -10.00), lack of education on sexual issues (r= -6.76), socioeconomic status in the form of self-assessment of housing prices in the intermediate range (r=8.85) and self-assessment of financial ability to buy housing is very low (r= -14.52), depression (r= -1.93) and meaning of life (r=0.11)(p<0.05).

The meaning in life in the presence of other demographic, medical, psychological, and socioeconomic factors had a continuous and significant relationship with the quality of sexual life and it is necessary to pay attention to these factors in planning related to students. further studies can be conducted to search for factors that improve the meaning of life and, accordingly, the quality of sexual life of students and their spouses.