Blog #10: Marriage Report

by Saori, Airi, and Asami

Introduction

It is said that we have some turning points thought the life. There is an entrance ceremony, a coming-of-age ceremony, to get job, and so on in turning points. But marriage is the most greatly exchange event in the life above all. The history of the marriage in Japan is very deep. According to Ijuin (2011), there was an opinion that “love=marriage” existed in Japanese oldest songbook Manyoshu tanka collection, and both man and woman increased love feeling and chose a marriage partner with the feeling that to be in together. Also parents chose their children partner for each other’s profit, so people were not able to marriage when the partner’s social position was as same as the other in the Edo era. And at last, a love marriage came to be permitted in the 1880s(Meiji era). According to Ishizaki (2011), in modern times, the factors which men demanded for a woman as a marriage partner were to have the housekeeping ability, knowledge of child care, health and the will-power to a social action. In other side, the factors which woman demanded for a man as a marriage partner were to have good educational background, economic power, and to be honest. This idea of marriage continued until postwar rapid economic growth.However other research results shows different opinions from this trend. Research by Japanese research company, Recruit searched and analyzed that both man and woman values how much people love a partner, but Sunmarie, a dating agency shows that still people selects a marriage partner by economic status. This time, we expected that there is a difference opinion between male and female, and we would like to re-research and decide what is the most important factor for choosing a marriage partner in modern age.

Procedure

We surveyed about condition which people need for a marriage partner. First, we asked 20 university students (10 male and 10 female) who major psychology and they are from 19 to 23 years old. There are two questions on this survey: (1) What are important points for choosing a marriage partner (2) Chose the most important point, and reason for choosing it. In first question, they rated 10 factors on a 5 point scale. Finally, we averaged every question’s point by sex. Table 1 shows 10 factors(criteria) in question paper.

Tab 1. 10 criteria in research paper

Criteria name

Kindness

How much your partner love you

Ability of family working

Consciences

Money sense

Unanimous lifestyle

Be close in age

Appearance – looking, weight and height

Shared interests

Academic background

Economic ability

Social status

Results

In analyze part; we calculated the average of criteria's rate. If many answerers thought criteria “A” is the most important, then the average of A rate would be higher so it is easy to see the results. Second question is just for researching people’s view for those criteria.

                Firstly, you can see all results of the survey to see table 2. And figure 1. Figure 1 is the graph from table 2. The survey shows that male’s opinions of the criteria for choosing a marriage partner are; Kindness, How much your partner love you, and Ability of family working, and Consciences. Oppositely, female’s opinions are; Consciences, How much your partner love you, Kindness, Money sense. Male’s lowest rate of factor is Social status or Economic ability. Nevertheless, female’s lowest criterion is Academic ability. As a result, there is a similarity between male and female’s answer that love, kindness or consciences are important fact for a marriage. In particular, love or characteristic bear a determine relationship to choosing a marriage partner. However, female rates that money sense is important factor (point was 4.7), yet male didn’t rate like that (point was 3.6). Male cares about ability of family working such as household tasks. Those results suggests that male thinks female works as a house-keeping, and female thinks male is a provider of family.

                Secondly, we would like to see figure 1. It shows how subjects rated on each criteria. First of all, the graph indicates that female’s average is higher than all male’s average, so we looked at the criteria which seems to be a striking difference. We took three criteria which has difference over 1.0 points such as: Money sense, Economic background, and Social status(“Consciences” has also difference over 1.0 points, but both are higher so we concluded that is important for both sex). Female rated those three criteria higher than male which means female thought it is important for choosing a marriage partner. We think these have one characteristic in common. It is money-related. So again, female thinks male is an income earner for a family. Besides those results, there are similar averages on “Be close in age”, “Appearance”, and “Shared interests”. Those average is between 3.0~4.0, so it looks there is no difference between both sex.

Tab 2. The average of 10 criteria

	Male average	Female average
Kindness	4.5	4.8
How much your partner love you	4.2	4.9
Ability of family working	4.1	4.0
Consciences	4.0	5.0
Money sense	3.6	4.7
Unanimous lifestyle	3.6	4.3
Be close in age	3.5	3.7
Appearance – looking, weight and height	3.4	3.5
Shared interests	2.9	3.5
Academic background	2.4	2.9
Economic ability	2.3	4.2
Social status	2.0	3.4

Fig 1. Graph of results from survey

Conclusion

In this report, our hypothesis that there is a difference between male’s opinion and female’s in the most important factor for choosing a marriage partner. Indeed, many reports and researchers informed the reason Japanese men want woman is for their house-keeping ability, or appearance. Oppositely, Japanese woman will chose a man who has an economic status. However, there is a bit difference from this report’s survey result. The first thing that astonished us was both woman and man didn’t put weight on appearance. Also, woman didn’t care about an academic status which will b connect to economic strength. Nevertheless, woman want man for economic power. Secondly, man commented that they want to have a life with love just for enjoying their life, but woman noted that economic or love from husband because luck of them will destroy marriage life. From those result, we can conclude two things. (1) There is a “gender” bias that man will be work, and woman will be at home because man didn’t care about money, and woman didn’t care about their ability so much. (Gender bias means social difference in sex) (2) Difference from the general report was answerers – because they were too young to thinking about marriage, so they didn’t have actual and reasonable thinking for a marriage – that’s why lots of people selected “love from others” as the important fact. We hope that people can think about a marriage partner without the handicaps of gender bias, and answer will be individually.

Citations

Y. Ijuin and S.Isizaki (2011). Rekishi no naka no kazoku to kekkon. (History of marriage in gender and family). Japan: Chi no mori. pp. 101

References

Sunmarie (2011). The konkatsu research[What is the reason for decide marriage?]. Available: http://www.sunmarie.com/konkatsu/ank/anq021.html (2012/12/20)

Zexy net (2011). Zexy net love news[Why do you want to marriage to your partner?]. Available: http://zexy.net/contents/lovenews/article.php?d=20120426 (2012/12/20)