Abstract:
The purpose of this cross-sectional survey study was to explore the marital relationship of menopausal women in Buriram Province and related factors. The sample consisted of 260 menopausal women who attended the menopausal clinics in six hospitals under the Ministry of Public Health. Data collection was accomplished through a self-administered questionnaire and scales had reliability coefficients ranging from 0.68-0.88. Data were analyzed by descriptive and inferential statistics. The results showed that the overall marital relationship of menopausal women were at a moderate level (86.5 percent). The eight factors that were associated with overall marital relationship among menopausal women with the statistical significance were attitude toward marriage, sexual satisfaction, communication between spouses, role function between spouses, relationship between relatives, underlying disease of spouse, occupation of spouse, and having offspring. Five considerable predictors of overall marital relationship among menopausal women were attitude toward marriage, communication between spouses, spouse with underlying disease, role function between spouses, and spouse occupation being a government officer (Beta = 0.52, 0.19, -0.15, 0.14, and 0.13, respectively) These accounted for 54 percent of the variance in the overall marital relationship. The findings lead to recommendations, that health personnel officers in the menopause clinics should give coursed to both menopausal women and their spouses in order to establish good and stable relationships the their among women in menopause.