[VladMamu]

I wanted to share this with you guys! It could be interesting for parents and kids in western cultures, whom could face this issue in the future.



Running head: ARRANGED MARRIAGES VERSES LOVE MARRIAGES







Arranged Marriages Verses Love Marriages in Second Generation Canadians
Vladimir (aka. Whiteguy)
*********
Kwantlen University College
February 1, 2005










Introduction
This short preliminary survey is about the perception of arranged marriages of the parents, and the children of the parents, whose ethnic origin comes from areas of the world where arranged marriages are practiced. The reason I wanted to do a study on this topic is because I am dating a women whose parents are from South Asia, and I was interested in knowing how other parents and children of similar backgrounds perceive arranged as opposed to love marriages. My fiancée is from Bangladesh and I am from Czech Republic, and after reading several studies and personal stories of women in her situation, I now have a greater understanding of the culture and of what she is going through. I believe studies such as this one will help both cultures understand each other in light of the large bridging of cultures that is occurring in North America and Europe. There are two abstracts that I studied for this research paper, and I was surprised in particular by one abstract which revealed about 20 personal interviews of women whose parents were from the South and Middle East whom told stories which were similar to my fiancée’s (Zaidi & Shuraydi, 2002). I thought she was eccentric or unusual for a Muslim women in wanting to choose her own partner, even at the risk of loosing all contact with her family, whether they accepted it or not. Due to my past research in Psychology 200 in arranged marriages, I was a little familiar with the topic and so I suggested that instead of her running away, we meet her parents together, which gave them the option of accepting the partnership, which they did, eventually. In particular in Zaidi and Shuraydi (2002, study, there were 20 women of whom 15 said they would rebel against there parents, and would only arranged marry if they failed to find their own partners. There is a large increase of ethnic Muslim and Hindu immigrants coming to Canada and Western society in general and more studies need to be done in this area to help bridge the lack of understanding between parents and kids of these immigrant cultures (Lalonde, Hynie, Pannu and Tatla, 2004). This will help second generation immigrants, such as myself and my fiancée, in coping with the difficult situation of bridging our two cultures together.

Method
The 50 participants of the survey were students of Kwantlen University College. My intent was to spend several hours at the college and try to collect twenty surveys from people. However, there was such a wide spread interest, that I did not even make it out of the first building, which was building G. My fiancée participated in helping me collect the data and we started in the Kwantlen Student Association Cafeteria, and proceeded to the lounge in building G. My group members also approached colleagues in the G building and found everyone helpful and interested in the topic. Everyone was informed that it was a preliminary survey that is trying to uncover attitudes of Western College Students with parents from countries where arranged marriages are practiced. We went up to non-White individuals, to shorten the time and amount of irrelevant respondents, because most Whites do not practice arranged marriages. We explained to everyone that the survey is anonymous and that participation is optional. They were also informed that they don’t have to fill out any questions they do not like and they can quit anytime. We had two large envelopes, one with unfilled surveys and one with filled surveys. We asked the participants to fold the paper in halve and to put the folded paper in a large brown envelope with the other filled folded surveys. This way we had no idea whom each survey was from, and it was completely anonymous. My fiancée went up to females and I approached both males and females. We had 10 females and 10 males, and another 30 participants from my group, however, we did not ask for the gender on this preliminary survey. All subjects were given the same blue pens, although some used their own pens.
Findings
It was found that the majority of our respondents had intimate relations with only one or zero individuals. Interestingly, as predicted by our group, when asked to evaluate the statement that “In my opinion, arranged marriage is the only option”, it was found that as people had more physical relations experience, they much strongly disagreed with this statement. The numbers show that two whom strongly agree with the statement, had only 2 to 5 physical relations combined between them. As you progress down the chart to strongly disagree with this statement, the physical relations climb to over 125 combined between individuals. Most of the data collected showed that about halve of their parents were in favour of arranged marriages. The ethnicity of the parents at Kwantlen University College from our small sample were about three-quarters from India, about a quarter were from Bangladesh, Fiji and Iran, and the rest were variously scattered. When asked “Do you feel that your education has had an effect on your attitudes towards arranged marriage?” over three-quarters said no, and the rest said yes or maybe. The mean for intimate relations was calculated. Out of 41 people it was 2.43, standard deviation 1.285. Twenty-five percent had zero intimate relations. Over thirty-three percent had one physical relations. Over twenty-five percent had 2 to 5 physical relations. Over seven percent had six to ten physical relations. The remaining almost 8 percent were evenly divided between eleven to twenty and twenty-one to fifty physical relations.
Discussion
The fact that the sample was from University College educated students would suggest that the majority of the respondents speak English fluently, and hence have lived here for many years, perhaps were even born in Canada. This would indicate that they were more Westernized in their thinking than a comparable sample of non University College students. Furthermore, having more physical relations with multiple partners in no way suggests that that is a cause for adopting Love marriage values rather than Arrange Marriage values, however, there is a positive correlation between the two. Also, it is well known that India is more liberal and Westernized in it’s thinking as opposed to Bangladesh for instance, so it would be interesting to get a larger sample of respondents from countries such as Bangladesh and Indonesia.
Conclusion
Overall this preliminary study has shown me that non-White students whose parents are from countries where arranged marriages are still practiced strongly disagree with the Arranged Marriage being the only option. This finding suggested that my fiancée is not eccentric and in fact is the norm among her peers. This information gives me the educated power to be able to convince some of her family’s friends that she should be and could be tolerated and respected for her decision to opt out of the arranged marriage system and choose her own partner.
For future research on this topic I would suggest that the gender be asked for which was not in this paper to assess if there is a difference in attitude between woman and men. I would suggest asking how long their parents have been in Canada and how long they have been in Canada, along with their age. There religion would be interesting to know, as the attitudes are more stringent between the Muslim population as assumed by the general public, and it would be interesting to see if this assumption is indeed true.

















References
Lalonde R., Hynie M., Pannu M., Tatla S., (2004) The Role of Culture in Interpersonal
Relationships: Do Second Generation South Asian Canadians Want a Traditional Partner? Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology (35)5, 503-524. Retrieved
January 29th, 2005 from Psych Info database.
Zaidi, A, Shuraydi, M. (2002). Perceptions of arranged marriages by young Pakistani Muslim
Women living in a Western society. Journal of Comparative Family Studies (33)4, 495-
514. Retrieved January 29th, 2005 from Psych Info database.


I invite criticisms.
Thanks.