A statistical analysis on living together without a traditional and legal marriage

Abstract

Nowadays, western culture has greatly influenced the Thai life style including the economy, society and culture. Moreover, it has affected the Thai culture in such a way that it causes Thai undergraduate students not to care about their virginity. This work was aimed to study the attitudes towards living together without a traditional and legal marriage and to obtain personal data of undergraduate students in the city of Chiang Mai. The factors affecting their living together, the proportion of the ones who agreed and did not agree to this idea and the effects of their behavior were also studied. The 453 undergraduate students were sampled from 15 institutes by using the stratified random sampling method. Each institute was treated as a stratum. The numbers of male and female were approximately equal. The analytical statistics in this study were descriptive statistics, nonparametric statistics, categorical principal component analysis, categorical regression and a correspondence analysis. Personal data and the attitudes towards living together were variables, occurring together in high correlation coefficient of 0.91. At 5 % level of significance, we found that the important personal data: sex, age, institute, education level, marital status of father and mother, residence, incomes, expenses and family debts affected the attitudes towards living together without a traditional and legal marriage. The marital status of father and mother and residence had the highest effect. Most students thought that sex drive, eagerness, western cultural influence, media influence and spending life together were the most important factors. The proportion of the students agreeing to living together without a traditional and legal marriage was at least 80%. The troublesome effects which they were most concerned were pregnancy, abortion and sexually- transmitted diseases, respectively.