Meshesha, Ayele (PhD)Elias, Senper2018-08-092023-11-182018-08-092023-11-182014-05http://etd.aau.edu.et/handle/12345678/11364The average age at which young adults are getting married has been slowly increasing over the last four decades. A variety of reasons have been proposed to explain why different people may have different attitudes toward marriage; however a few stick out in particular. Attitudes toward marriage in young adults have been shown to differ between the children of married parents and divorced parents as well as between young adults who were brought up from different parenting styles. The present study seeks to determine if young adults differ in their attitude towards marriage as a function of their parent’s marital status and by the way they were raised. Possible mediator of the relationship between parenting styles and marriage attitudes is also explored, namely religiosity. The data on demographic characteristics, parenting styles and marital attitudes were collected through a likert type questionnaire from a sample of 80 (40 females and 40 males) post graduate fist year students selected randomly from Unity university and Sri-Sai College. Pilot study was conducted on 20 students from both colleges and reliability was tested through a Cronbach’s alpha of 0.765. Pearson Product Moment correlation, Independent t-test and one way ANOVA were employed to analyze the data. As a result it was found that parenting styles and the attitude toward marriage has indeed a positive correlation, though it was a weak correlation. This study also found that there is no statistical difference between male and female on their attitude towards marriage.enDemographic characteristicsThesis