To browse Academia. Bailey first became interested in studying courtship attitudes and behavior when, as a college senior, she appeared on a television talk show to defend coed dorms, which were then relatively new and controversial. She was surprised when many people in the audience objected to coed dorms not on moral grounds but out of fear that too much intimacy between young men and women would hasten "the dissolution of the dating system and the death of romance.
Implications of cohabitation for courtship were explored in a two-year study of college dating couples. No differences were found between living together and other "going together" couples in rates of marriage or breakup over the course of the study.
Differences were found, however, in reports of satisfaction, intimacy, problems, expectations of marriage, the balance of power, and transition to marriage. Results suggest that cohabitation in college may influence the development of dating relationships, but that it does not pose a threat to the institution of marriage as feared in the popular press. College has long served as a meeting place in the mate selection process for a significant number of young people cf.
Scott, Increasingly, however, courtship in college involves a new element: living together before marriage. The number of college students who live with a dating partner at some point in their college career is now estimated to be about 25 percent Macklin, It investigated the prevalence of cohabitation as a form of courtship among undergraduates as well as its consequences.
The study was done with the aid of questionnaire and an indepth interview quantitative and qualitative method of data collection. Questionnaires were distributed among two hundred and seventy students and fourteen 14 undergraduates were interviewed to gather information on cohabitation as a form of courtship among undergraduates. Data collected were analyzed using frequency distribution simple percentage, while the hypothesis was tested using chi β square. The result of the findings revealed that cohabitation is prevalent among undergraduates, because it is viewed as a form of courtship.
