Context

According to the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (2014), marriage is a legally or formally recognized union of a man and a woman (or, in some jurisdictions, two people of the same sex) as partners in a relationship. However, the concept of marriage has no common description due to differences in cultures.

(Need real reference, took from Wikipedia [WU4] ) Generally, there are two basic types of marriage: civil and religious. However, there are also about 65 more types and branches of this term around the world, separated according to intentions and relations to legislation of marriage. This research concerns only about civil ones and implies no more than two partners.

Civil marriage was always recognized by society as an act of mental maturity and responsibility. However, nowadays many people who are passionate about their well-being consider marriage as a way of getting financial security; they merely cannot focus on finding the man of their dreams since they tend to care about survival.

“ Okay, let’s just be honest. Many people marry for money. This is their number one objective. They go to places where the rich hang out with the sole intention of meeting and marrying up. Anything less than wealthy is not an option. Falling in love with somebody poor would be settling. And we can’t allow that to happen, can we? ”(p. 80) – That’s how Rolf Nabb (2005) in his book named “How to Meet and Marry the Right Person: A Guide” (4)clearly describes this case. However, he wrote then, “ A marriage where money is the uniting factor will never be successful. ”(p. 81) It means that from his point of view marrying with intention of becoming wealthy is doomed to fail, therefore, marriage will not last long. The thing is that people who look for financial support are not interested in making the marriage last longer, because they can get at least half of the property from their partner through the trial[WU5]. This shows that there is a real tendency to get marry for benefit[WU6] and many people avow that without getting ashamed[WU7].

(There will be some information from the past research)

According to the Relationships Indicators Survey (2008) conducted by Relationships Australia and CUA, the reasons why people get married are: (See the Appendix 10.2)

However, as it was mentioned before, people’s attitudes depend on their culture, worldview and lifestyle. In Kazakhstan, for example, despite no researches were made upon this issue, the results would probably differ from those taken in Australia. Therefore, this research was designed to reveal the reasons of why people in Kazakhstan get married and how their intentions connected with financial security.

Aims

The main purpose of this research was to investigate public opinion in Kazakhstan on marriage. The aim was to find out the reasons why people marry and to explore their attitudes and visions of marriage. This comprises the role of money and its impact on people’s decisions.

Thus, the main research questions of this investigation were:

v How seeking for financial security and other hidden purposes can lead to marriage?

v Has marrying for financial security become the new interpretation of love in XXI century?

v Does the modern marriage destroy romantic love & pure feelings?

v What are the reasons of marriage in Kazakhstan and how they differ from those in the other parts of the world?

v What average people expect from marriage?

The results of this research were aimed to clarify the notion of marriage and increase its understanding among young people in order to decrease the number of divorces.

Method

The research design was mostly focused on its qualitative aspect, since the questions required to be asked fully and descriptively. This method is often used to explore why and how of decision making and therefore, has a reasonable basis in the field of sociology.

The primary research was designed as face-to-face questionnaire which included 10 interviewees. In order to raise validity and reliability, interview has been taken by various groups of people. First[WU8] group was consisting of young people at around 17-28 years old who was not married yet. Second group comprised elder people who are currently married or have had a divorce. The most[WU9] of interview participants (8 people) were born in Kazakhstan, however the foreigners’ (2people) opinion had been also considered. All interviewees had been asked independently from their gender, race, age, religion and beliefs.

The interviews have been taken individually, in an informal atmosphere. People were informed about the purposes and importance of the research. The interviewer guaranteed confidentiality of gathered data and asked people to feel free to speak frankly. In order to make people feel more comfortable, the interview was conducted in a special relaxation room with soft sofas and chairs. Furthermore, all people permitted to record their speech and use it as an examples or quotes in the research. In order to get more information and raise the quality of the research, a discussion (debate, conversation) with Kazakh people and foreigners were made also. People were asked to discuss the given topic with each other and express their point of view. This has helped to get an objective picture of the topic and clearly realize the contrast in opinions between people of different cultures.

The research was conducted in a local school of Taraz city called Nazarbayev Intellectual School of Mathematics and Physics. The reasons for selection of this place were:

v The presence of people from different parts of the world

v The presence of people from different cities of the Kazakhstan

v The erudition of people is at high degree

v There was various age groups

v Teachers and students were interested in taking parts in the research

All these factors enabled the outcomes of this research to be generalisable to all people in Taraz, and possibly in Kazakhstan.

Regarding background research, some resources from libraries and internet were used to get general information about the topic. Since the research area is dependant on people’s beliefs, there were almost no reliable and credible academic sources, except for published books[WU10]. However, some authors might try to impress the reader by making exaggerated or biased statements. This could bring partial bias in the data.

In order to prevent these problems, many authors’ viewpoints were considered. Moreover, only printed and well-known works were used in this research. The research does not include any information from blogs, journals,.com sites, because of potential bias that may occur.

The information gained was critically analyzed, compared, and applied in the research. The outcomes are given in the next section of this paper.