The Influence of Premarital Counseling Regarding Consanguineous Marriage on Knowledge and attitude Among University Students

Abstract

Consanguineous marriages have been practiced for hundreds of years in many communities throughout the world. Although the practice rate is generally declining, most Middle Eastern Arabs have a custom of preferring consanguineous marriages, and this returned to different factors like educational level, religion, and socio-cultural factors. Harmful consequences of these marriages as spreading many genetic diseases put a strain on various aspects of health, social, psychological, and economic and reflect the negative aspects of the family and society's life. So, it is necessary to understand the consequences resulting and make premarital counseling is mandatory to avoid these risks (Jaber et al., 2017). Premarital counseling plays a vital role in the early detection of couples with consanguineous and non-consanguineous marriage for harmful expected genetic disease and other symptoms related to specific diseases that are diagnosed and treated before marriage, so the ministry of health makes premarital counseling as obligatory for completion marriage rules for every couple.

The present study aimed to study premarital counseling's influence regarding consanguineous marriage on the knowledge and attitude of university students. A quasi-experimental study was conducted in the Faculty of Nursing Ain Shams University to achieve the study objective. A purposive sample technique used, and this technique followed for daily data collection until its completion. 178 students included in the study, starting from 28/10/2018 till 13/12/2018 for first part students and the second part students from 10/3/2019 to 30/4/2019. It has been done through three tools: a structured interviewing questionnaire sheet to study premarital counseling's influence regarding consanguineous marriage on the student's knowledge, student's likert attitude scale and student's satisfaction tool. The present study revealed that: • About 97.8% of the studied sample have ages between 20- 25 years old, and 64% live in urban areas. Also, father and mother educational level 59.6 %, 62.9% have secondary level, respectively.