Premarital Preparation : An Educational Content Design for Seventh-day Adventists in the United States
Problem. The church participates in the marriage process by providing its facilities, performing the ceremony, and establishing marriage supportive norms. Increasing divorce rates produce calls for premarital preparationefforts by the church. It was the purpose of the present study to develop a validated educational content design for Seventh-day Adventists useful to the church in preparing couples for marriage. Method. An analysis of the relevant literature from religious and secular authorities was made to isolate factors deemed important to adequate premarital preparation. These factors were then rank-ordered. A random sample of seven hundred presently married Seventh-day Adventists from the northwestern, midwestern, and southeastern United States was obtained. Using the content factors obtained from the literature, a Premarriage Education Survey was developed using a seven-point Likert Scale. The responses by category were rank-ordered and compared with the factors obtained from the literature using the Spearman rank order correlation coefficient. The survey respondents provided a number of demographic variables that were compared with their survey responses using an analysis of variance to determine if factors varied significantly by age, geographical area, marital status, or by participating in the Seveth-day Adventist Church. Results. No denomination-wide premarital preparation programs were identified. Seventh-day Adventists in thesample did differ in the rankings of topics and factors from that of taxonomy developed from the literature and experts analyzed using Spearman Rho coefficients at the .05 level, often inversely. The analysis of variance comparing mean factor scores with demographic varibles showed few significant differences in response patterns within the sample. An educational content design was produced based on the Adventist-validated taxonomy of factors.
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