Attitudes of university youth towards popular proverbs regarding marital choice A study on a sample of university youth at the University of M’sila

Abstract

This study aimed to explore the attitudes of university students towards folk proverbs related to marital choices, understanding their perceptions of these proverbs, and examining the extent to which they accept or reject them, along with uncovering gender differences in this regard. To achieve these objectives, a descriptive approach was adopted, and a questionnaire was

administered to a sample of approximately 2000 students through social media platforms. A total of 231 questionnaires were collected, yielding the following results:

• The majority of the surveyed youth demonstrated positive perceptions towards folk proverbs associated with marriage choices, representing 72.64% of the sample. Conversely, the proportion of those who expressed negative perceptions was below 12%, indicating that most university students identify with and adopt these folk proverbs in their marital decision-making process, while the remaining percentage neither identifies with nor adopts these proverbs.
• Most university students accept and adopt these folk proverbs in their marital decision-making process.

With a t-value of 4.80 at 316 degrees of freedom and a significance of 0.00, we conclude that there are gender differences in their responses to the total phrases. Upon examining the mean values, it is evident that the average values for females are higher than those for males, indicating that females are more accepting of these proverbs compared to males. This may be attributed to the fact that most of the folk proverbs presented to the participants had positive descriptions of females, which they favored compared to males, resulting in a high adoption rate of folk proverbs among females.