Marital Stability and Job Progression of Women in the Civil Service of Cross River State, Nigeria.

The main purpose of the study was to investigate the relationship that exists between marital stability and job progression among women in the civil service of Cross River State, Nigeria. Two hypotheses guided the study. Survey research design was adopted for this study. The population of this study consists of all the 23,346 married women in the civil service of Cross River State. Stratified random sampling technique was used to select total of seven hundred and fifty-eight (758) married women in the study area, selected from 10 local government area of Cross River State. Three experts validated the instruments that was used to collect data for the study. The instrument that was used for data collection in this study is a questionnaire titled “Marital stability and Job Progression Questionnaire” (MSJPQ) was administered to the respondents to elicit their responses. The instrument has 16 items with 4- option answer format. The instrument was in three sections, section A elicited information on the demographic data of the respondents with 3 items while section B elicited information from the respondents on Marital Stability with six items, six items, while section C elicited questions about the respondents marital stability and Job progression ten items each in section C on a 4-point Likert scale. Cronbach Alpha coefficient was used to determine the reliability estimate of the instrument ranging from .73-.87. One sample t-test was used to test the hypotheses at 0.05 level of significance. The result showed that there is a high level of marital stability and Job progression among women in the Civil Service of Cross River State, Nigeria. It was recommended that Government should run counselling services even before anyone is employed in their office, to enable they be able to manage work and family and to make sure they understand the importance of communication among couples, intimacy, conflict management, for the maintenance of work-family balance.