Document Type : Practical article
Authors
1 Member of the Faculty of Sociology, Ilam University, Ilam, Iran.
2 Department of Sociology and Cultural Studies, Ilam University, Ilam, Iran.
Abstract
Marriage is one of the three milestones in human life, i.e. birth, marriage, and death. Marriage is related to changes in a person's view of himself, his wife, and the world. A person who gets married is affected by changes in personal and social fields. Therefore, if an important disturbance occurs in a person's marriage, all his personal, interpersonal, and social processes will be affected. The social developments of the past decades at the global level have faced the family system with new and diverse changes, challenges, issues, and needs. During this period, the family has been increasingly under threat due to multiple and complex factors. When the functions of the family, such as biological, social, cognitive, and emotional functions are damaged one after another, its members gradually lose their sense of satisfaction. The gradual decrease in the satisfaction of the family members first causes psychological dissociation, then social dissociation, and finally, a legal event, which is called divorce. Divorce is one of the factors of breaking up and disintegrating the family unit, which can have many consequences for people in society. Nowadays, virtual social networks play a role as one of the most important factors in many divorces and disturbances in couples' relationships. The purpose of this research is to study how marital life changes and breaks up through virtual social networks from the perspective of divorced women in Ilam City. The research paradigm is constructive and interpretive; The research approach is qualitative and the research strategy is phenomenology. Thematic analysis and Brown and Clark's framework have been used for data analysis. Of course, it should be mentioned that two types of methods in phenomenology, i.e. interpretation and explanation, have been used to analyze the results. The studied community includes all the divorced women of Ilam City who have had the experience of using virtual social networks. How to choose the subjects to be studied are based on purposeful sampling. The number of samples until the theoretical saturation stage was estimated to be 15 people. The data collection tool is a semi-structured interview. This research was done to answer three important questions. How do divorced women understand, define, and interpret family and marital relations? How do virtual networks become the basis for breaking up and transforming marital relations? What are the most important virtual social networks used by women that have been effective in breaking up relationships? In this research, the understanding, definition, and subjective meaning of divorced women from family and marital relationships in the form of 4 categories "family as a system", "unfavorable image of family", "difference between previous interpretations and existing reality" and "fatalistic attitude" became. The results of the research showed that the evolution and breakup of married life can be analyzed and investigated from the point of view of divorced women in the form of main themes including "creating cocoons of loneliness", "separation from kinship networks", "individual injuries", "destructive", "Instrument of family dysfunction", "consumption display", and "virtual networks as the transformation of value system".In this research, the most important social networks used by divorced women, which have been effective in creating coldness and eventually breaking the relationship in these families, are, respectively: Instagram, WhatsApp, Telegram, and YouTube. In the current research and based on the statements of divorced women, it can be concluded that virtual social networks have played a role in marital dissatisfaction. The Elamite society and culture and consequently the people in the family institution have been affected by these communication technologies. It seems that virtual social networks cannot be interpreted as inherently bad or good, but their impact on the private and social life of people depends on the amount and time of their use, because as the results and women's conversations show, extreme use and In a way, the addiction to these spaces has been effective in changing and breaking relationships between the members of these families. If a context is provided so that family members can find out how to use these spaces to strengthen their family cohesion and bonds, it will also have positive results, but non-interactive uses of this space will lead to rejection and social isolation of people in the family and Society has created. At the end of the research and according to the obtained results, research and practical suggestions have been presented.
Keywords
)