Application of the Fuzzy Delphi Method to Identify and Prioritize the Social-Health Family Disintegration Indicators in Yemen

Constantly increasing political events and socially related changes have led governments worldwide to adopt strategies to reduce their negative effects on the cohesion of societies, which requires developing assessment frameworks that include realistic, measurable, and useful indicators for analyzing the family disintegration causes, taking into consideration the circumstances surrounding the countries and the development trends that they adopt. Therefore, this study aims to identify and prioritize indicators of a decision-making support framework for evaluation, ranking, and structural comparison of the family disintegration causes resulting from the child marriage phenomenon in Yemen. To achieve this, the Fuzzy Delphi Method was applied. Firstly, a set of related literature and theories were analyzed to extract the expected framework's suitable initial indicators. Then, with the participation of twentyfour local experts, the extracted factors were revised, and the most suitable factors were selected. As a result, one social factor out of nine social-health factors was excluded due to its inappropriateness, and a framework of eight indicators was built. Also, with a rating average of 0.727, it was consistently agreed that the indicator "Increasing divorce rates in marital cases that do not take place according to the common desire of the spouses" is the most important indicator. Also, with high consistent evaluation averages (0.652–0.658), all three health indicators were ranked in the second and third places, while the other four social indicators were ranked in the last three positions (fourth– sixth). Finally, the real applications of the proposed framework were recommended.