Investigating the Reasons of the Girls’ Marriage Delay: A Qualitative Research

The present research studied the reasons of the girls’ marriage delay based on their own viewpoints with the qualitative approach and taking advantage of the descriptive phenomenological method. The data of research was collected through the semi-structured interview with twenty single girls whose age ranged from 18 to 55 years old and selected through the purposive sampling. The interviews were thematically classified and interpreted. The results of research clarified that the marriage delay is affected by the numerous individual reasons. At micro level, it is referred to the issues such as the disincentive beliefs, not finding an ideal person, the appearance properties, the pessimism and the lack of trust, the fatalism, as well as the family issues. At the intermediate level, it is included the elements such as the idealism of the family, putting emphasis on getting married to the relatives, problems such as one-parent-family and poverty of family as well as the structural reasons. Moreover, the issues such as lack of balance in the population, the economic conditions, the cultural changes, the negative effects of media and the virtual world are categorized under the macro level. Against the previous results of researches, there were no idealistic and materialistic criteria in the girls’ viewpoints. In their view, the most important criteria of the appropriate person for marriage were the interest, similarity and mutual understanding. Moreover, marriage delay is mostly affected by the family conditions, the social and cultural elements more than the economic element which is mostly agreed upon among the researchers.