Painful Side of Flirting: Role of Parents' Education Level on Flirting Violence

Abstract

Love is one of important needs that human beings meet to continue their lives. The reason is that people establish relationships with others to meet this need, and among these relationships, the love-based one is called flirting. The quality of these relationships determines whether this love will continue in future or not. Also, violence to be experienced in flirting is important to maintain the relationship. People are likely to be influenced by the structure of the society they belong to. In this respect, the family is a social unit, and it is important to remember that an individual shapes himself or herself within the family. An individual's violent attitudes are shaped within the family as well, and this is also the case for flirting violence. The violence that individuals were exposed to in the past is likely to be a sign of future probable violence. Therefore, individuals may reflect that violence upon his or her partner in the period of flirting. In line with the suggestions put forward in the researcher's previous studies on students' thoughts about flirting violence, it was considered to be necessary to investigate parents' education, which is thought to be likely to increase flirting violence. In this respect, the present study was carried out with 250 students taking the courses of psychology, developmental psychology, health communication, and communication within the family, which the researcher gave in associate degree, undergraduate and postgraduate programs at Anadolu University in the academic year of 2016-2017. The questions used in the study were distributed to the students in class, and they were asked to respond to the questions on voluntary basis. In the study, of all the students, 178 of them responded to the questions. In relation to the factors influential on the participants' views about the flirting process and about flirting violence, the relationship between their views and their parents' levels of education was examined. The questionnaire data were analyzed with Chi-Square test using the package software of SPSS. The results revealed that within the socio-cultural structure, the mother's education level was not significantly influential on flirtingviolence while the father's education level significantly triggered flirting violence.