Marital Relationship Education in Saudi Arabia: Reflections on a Pilot Program for Women

Abstract

Saudi women tend to remain in unhappy marriages rather than initiating a divorce, leading to high rates of “emotional divorce.” A lack of problem-solving and healthy communication skills puts women in a vulnerable position in their marriage. Relationship education programs have been proven to effectively support healthier marriages. I delivered an adapted, evidence-based marital education program to 25 rural Saudi women. I examined their relationship education needs using a qualitative approach consisting of focus group, interviews, and my reflections. Data were analyzed deductively, and findings offered crucial insights into four domains of relationship education: the program environment, participants, design and delivery, and the program facilitator. The study found that program recruitment and access were facilitated by official college and community partnerships and communication; however, women indicated that household and transportation issues restricted their program access. Implications for both research and practice are considered.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 7 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.