The influence of romantic dominance on attitudes toward divorce of selected college students in the Philippines

In 2022, Philippine Senator Robin Padilla filed a bill to legalize divorce in the country. The bill lists 11 grounds for the filing of divorce in court. The objective of this study was to explore the degree of acceptability of these proposed divorce grounds from the viewpoint of selected college students. Based on the bill, the Philippine Divorce Attitude Questionnaire (PDAQ), a researcher-made, 5-point Likert scale questionnaire was created. In addition, the Dominance Scale was used to determine the respondents’ attitudes toward dominating a romantic relationship. Furthermore, the study attempted to determine whether a connection exists between the respondents’ PDAQ scores and their dominance scale scores. 157 college students from a school in Cainta, Rizal, Philippines volunteered to take part in this study. The PDAQ yielded total weighted means that had verbal interpretations of agree, irrespective of sex or presence of a romantic partner. Based on the PDAQ scores, in general the respondents agree to the divorce grounds laid down by the aforementioned senate bill. With respect to dominance, the respondents’ total weighted mean for the subscale of authority found that the respondents were non-authoritative. As for the dominance subscale of disparagement, the respondents’ total weighted means found that the they were non-disparaging. However, for the dominance subscale of restrictiveness, the respondents’ total weighted means showed that they were restrictive irrespective of sex or presence of a romantic partner. Furthermore, an extremely statistically significant difference between the responses of those with and without a romantic partner with respect to Dominance Disparagement subscale scores was established. Pearson r was computed between the respondents’ PDAQ scores and their dominance subscale scores in authority, restrictiveness and disparagement. A significant moderate inverse relationship was found between the respondents’ PDAQ and Dominance Authority subscale scores. This implies that for the respondents of this study, as their Dominance Authority subscale scores increase, their PDAQ scores moderately decrease and vice versa. In addition, a significant low inverse relationship between the respondents’ PDAQ and their Dominance Disparagement subscale scores was also established. In turn, this implies that for the respondents of this study, as their Dominance Disparagement subscale scores increase, their PDAQ scores slightly decrease and vice versa.