Because attitudes toward marriage impact the lives of many members of society,
it is important to understand what those attitudes are and what predicts such attitudes in
order to inform future research and marriage advocacy. Furthermore, to design studies to
examine attitudes toward marriage, it is important to have an understanding of the power
of previous studies. Towards those goals, this study attempted to answer two questions:
a) To what extent do attitudes of Albanians toward marriage parallel theorized typologies
of attitudes? b) What predicts membership in attitudinal groups?
To answer these questions, this study examined attitudes toward marriage among
Albanians using data from the 2008 European Values Study. It tested the hypothesis that
institutional, companionate, and individualistic attitudes toward marriage documented in
literature from Europe and North America would emerge in the data from Albania,
alongside a hypothesized fourth “façade” attitudinal grouping. It further tested the
hypothesis that lower educational attainment, higher religiosity, increasing age, being
male, living in rural areas, having a lower income, reporting lower parental educational
attainment, living with both parents at age 14, and having no history of cohabitation
would positively and significantly predict membership in more traditional attitudinal
clusters