Pre-Marital Cohabitation Factors: Evidence from Nigeria

Abstract

The study examined factors motivating pre-marital cohabitation through a survey, in which one hundred and twenty five married couples were drawn from selected areas of Lagos State, Nigeria, using stratified sampling technique. Information elicited from the participants through an administered questionnaire reflected a Cronbach Alpha reliability coefficient of 0.78. Descriptive statistics was employed to analyze the results of the study. Results revealed divergences in the views of the group (cohabiters) and responded less optimistic about the presumed benefits of pre-marital cohabitation while the control group (non-cohabiters) result revealed, that pre-marital cohabitation helps couples to learn more about each other's character- avoid- ance of disappointment, opportunity to learn to trust one another, and fear of infertility. Findings also showed the pseudo R2 which showed that all the thirteen variables were able to predict 23% of the overall nature of motivation towards premarital cohabitation at 1% alpha level (p<0.01). The p-value also showed only minimization of misunderstanding was significant at the 5% level, while opportunity to work on deficiency was significant at the 10% level. The stepwise logic regression results iden- tified the relative importance of the factors which is more definitive on the incremental productive power of each variable. It showed that minimization of misunderstanding accounts for 14.7% of the overall of 23.3% predictive power of the three sig- nificant factors. Opportunity to work on partner's deficiency and prevention of cheating accounted for 2.2% and 2.9% respec- tively. The contribution of any other variable was insignificant at the specified 5% alpha level. The findings of this study have provided insights into several aspects of issues bearing on the motivation for pre-marital cohabitation, especially in the study area within Nigeria. The conclusion of the findings of will be useful in evolving a parsimonious set of independent motivating factors to facilitate appropriate counselling programs on pre-marital cohabitation.