The Transformation of Intimate Relationships Among University Youth: The Case of Sakarya University

This study aims to explore the dynamics of premarital intimate relationships among undergraduate students at Sakarya University, which represents a postmodern melting pot at the intersection of agricultural traditional and industrial modern societal characteristics. This positioning makes the university a microcosm of Turkish society, with its diverse student body offering an ideal sample to demonstrate secularizing trends and cultural aspects such as individualization, the culture industry, and extensive narcissism, all of which emerge under global influences. The survey was conducted with 740 participants using stratified random sampling under a quantitative research methodology, as this approach enhances representativeness and ensures more precise comparisons across subgroups, thereby improving the reliability and generalizability of the findings. Accordingly, a confidence interval of 90% and an error margin of 0.3 were ensured in the survey. The selected data include variables such as the students’ levels of religiosity, the types of education (faculties), ideological predispositions, urbanization, and the duration and frequency of their current relationships, as these factors are anticipated to best reflect secularization trends. Thus, several findings reveal some remarkable consequences. For instance, the lower the level of religiosity among young people, the more they tend to be flexible and relaxed in their premarital intimate approaches. Students brought up in urban cities have more intimate experiences in the premarital stage than their counterparts from rural areas. Those who give priority to material demands in terms of ideological predispositions are more prone to engage in premarital sexual activities than those who give preference to spiritual and moral requirements. As a result, this research can be considered a contribution to the debates on modernity in the Turkish context of intimate relationships and family studies.