Pre-Marital Counseling and Its Influence on Marital Quality Among Seventh Day Adventist Members in Kibra Division of Nairobi County, Kenya

Abstract

The period before marriage is one of the most critical periods in life and also is very influential period in determining the health and quality of marriage in later life. This period is an opportune time for would be couples to prepare themselves for marital life. However, marriage is one of the few institutions where people enter into without any prior qualification. Therefore, a number of premarital counseling programs have been developed to prepare couples for the realities of family life about which they may lack adequate knowledge and experience. However, early research into the effectiveness of premarital counseling programs have yielded mixed results, thereby making the efficacy of premarital counseling programs a subject of ongoing empirical inquiry. This aimed at investigating pre-marital counseling and its influence on marital quality among the Seventh Day Adventist Kibera District Churches, Kibra Division, Kibra Constituency, Nairobi County, Kenya. The specific objectives were to establish the practice of premarital counseling in the churches, determine the preference of premarital counseling among church members and evaluate the perceived influence of pre-marital counseling on marital quality of members. The study was anchored on Solution Focused Theory of counseling. Descriptive survey research designs was used. The target population was Christian couples in the Seventh Day Adventist (SDA) churches in Kibera, Nairobi County. Disproportionate stratified sampling technique was used to select a total sample of 40 married individuals from the four locations within Kibra Division. Data was collected by administering questionnaires to the respondents. Data was analyzed using SPSS and Nvivo computer software and summarized using frequencies and percentages. Qualitative data was analyzed by generating underlying themes and subthemes. Results showed that respondents generally described the content of premarital counseling as comprised of communication skills, work-family balance, family finance, role of husband and wife, companionship, parenting and the importance of forgiveness in marriage. There was a general consensus that the premarital counseling program was typically brief, lasting for a few days, with each session running for about two hours. These were mostly tailor made to the individual couple. A higher proportion of the respondents who attended premarital counseling rated their marital quality in terms of stability and marital satisfaction as high compared to the proportion of respondents who did not participate in premarital counseling before they got married. The study concluded that premarital counseling has a lot of benefits in a marriage. It was recommended that churches should incorporate/ design a programme in their premarital counseling arrangement that will ensure follow up of the participants/couples after marriage for a given number of years.