Premarital Counselling and Marital Stability in Ondo State, Nigeria: A Cross-Sectional Survey of Utilisation, Barriers and Perceived Effectiveness

This study examined the association between premarital counselling and marital stability among married persons in Ondo State, Nigeria. Concern about marital dissolution in the state has been driven largely by court filing counts reported in the local press, but such counts are records of petitions lodged rather than of divorces granted, and they carry no population denominator, so they cannot be read as a divorce rate. The study therefore set out to establish an auditable local evidence base rather than to estimate divorce incidence. A descriptive cross-sectional survey was conducted among married persons across the three senatorial districts of Ondo State. A multi-stage sampling procedure was applied, with a target sample of 400 determined by Yamane’s formula at a 95 per cent confidence level and a 5 per cent margin of error; 194 valid responses were obtained, representing a 48.5 per cent response rate. Data were collected using the researcher-developed Premarital Counselling and Marital Stability Questionnaire and analysed in SPSS version 25 using frequencies, means, one-way analysis of variance and chi-square tests of independence at the 0.05 level. Reported utilisation of premarital counselling was low, with 74 respondents (38.1 per cent) indicating that they had received any form of premarital counselling and a utilisation cluster mean of 2.26 against a criterion mean of 2.50. Respondents identified lack of awareness, financial cost and limited counsellor availability as the most strongly endorsed barriers, while social stigma was the least strongly endorsed. Perceived effectiveness of counselling content was high, with communication skills training most strongly endorsed. Marital stability scores differed significantly across four levels of counselling exposure, F(3, 190) = 55.59, p < .001, with an eta squared of .467. Chi-square tests indicated significant associations between endorsement of counselling content and stability classification, and between reported access barriers and stability classification, with the exception of social stigma. Because the design is cross-sectional and no divorce outcome was measured, the findings describe associations rather than causal or preventive effects. The study concludes that premarital counselling is positively associated with self-reported marital stability in Ondo State and that awareness, affordability and counsellor supply are the constraints most amenable to policy attention.