Content Evaluation of the Pre-marriage Education Program Provided by the State Welfare Organization of Iran: The Perspective of Marriage Experts and Educators

Choosing appropriate content is one of the important issues in developing a curriculum and, at the same time, a solution to solve the associated problems. The present study evaluated the content of the pre-marriage education program provided by the State Welfare Organization of Iran to revise and update the program.

This is an applied, descriptive-survey, and mixed-method study. The statistical sample consisted of 25 marriage experts and 22 educators of the pre-marriage education program that were selected by a non-random purposive sampling method. The research instrument was created according to content selection principles. It had 31 items, answered on a four-point Liker scale, and four open-ended questions. The content validity index was above 0.79 for each item and whole items.

Based on the standard score of correction, the principles of validity and interest, utility, learnability and feasibility and significance, and finally the knowledge structure had priorities of 2, 3, 4, and 5, respectively, for content correction. The inter-rater reliability score of the expert and educator groups was 0.68 on the utility of the program. Also, the selective coding of the open-ended questions showed the values of 9, 11, 10, and 8, respectively, for questions about deleting content, preserving content, adding content, and suggesting a scientific resource.

The results indicated that the quality of the content could improve by focusing on updating and scientific validation of the content, fitting the program content with requirements and characteristics of the target group, fitting the content with the community atmosphere, and choosing an appropriate method of teaching. Also, according to the inter-rater reliability score, it can be concluded that the content has the highest and lowest levels of suitability in terms of significance and interest, respectively.