Abstract
Family scholars have devoted much effort to understand relationship strains and couple well-being. However, surprisingly few longitudinal studies have sought to capture within-individual variations in relationship strains over time, and the ways that family conditions moderate the association between relationship strains and couple well-being. Using four waves of panel data from the Canadian Work, Stress, and Health Study (2011–2017; n = 1778 individuals; 5058 person-years), this study investigates the association of relationship strains (i.e., the unequal division of housework, perceived housework unfairness, and spousal disputes) with couple relationship quality—and the extent to which family-to-work (FWC) and breadwinner status moderate that association. We use fixed effects regression techniques to analyze this diverse sample of workers with multi-item measures of focal variables. We find that the unequal division of housework, perceived housework unfairness, and spousal disputes are associated with lower levels of relationship quality, respectively. Moreover, FWC amplifies the adverse associations of perceived housework unfairness and spousal disputes with relationship quality over time—but FWC’s moderating influence is exacerbated among non-breadwinners. Our findings elaborate and sharpen the scope of FWC as a moderator (and breadwinner status as an additional contingency) in the application of equity theory alongside other conceptual ideas like stress amplification in the stress process model.
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Notes
We acknowledge that other labels have been used to describe this measure, like marital satisfaction/dissatisfaction (Chai & Schieman, 2021; Young et al., 2014). We submit that the underlying conceptual logic is similar in that the items represent the presence or absence of a perceived supportive relationship that reflect the assessment of relationship quality.
One reviewer raised the concern that paying someone else to do the housework might be associated with higher income compared to those who performed their own housework, which might bias our measure. In our study, 93.04% of the respondents performed their own housework while 6.96% of them paid someone else to do the housework. As the reviewer speculated, average personal and household income were higher for respondents who paid someone else to do the housework compared to those who performed their own housework ($98,256.27 vs. $63,847.15 for personal income; $183,453.7 vs. $121,892.6 for household income). Given that personal and household income tend to be positively skewed, we also calculated the corresponding medians for personal income ($90,000 vs. $55,000) and household income ($17,000 vs. $11,000). Our focal interest is breadwinner status—calculated using absolute personal income and household income. Although the percentage of breadwinner status is slightly higher for individuals who paid someone to do housework versus those who did their own housework (54.05% vs. 50.73%), we believe that this difference (3.3%) is too small to bias our measure. Moreover, we control for household income in all of our models.
One reviewer requested more discussion of between-individual variation. In response, we have included two sets of random effects models in Appendices 1 and 2, corresponding to each FE model shown in Tables 2 and 3. The patterns of FE and RE models largely remain the same. However, the sizes of the coefficients are generally larger in random effects models. These findings suggest that random effects models might overestimate the coefficients compared to fixed effects models because they are unable to account for unobserved time stable confounding.
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Acknowledgements
The authors are grateful to Laura Upenieks for comments on a previous version of this article.
Funding
A grant award from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) supports this study (Funding Reference Number: MOP-102730; PI: Scott Schieman).
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Appendices
Appendix 1
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Appendix 2
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Appendix 3
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Appendix 4
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Chai, L., Schieman, S. What Happens at Home Does Not Stay at Home: Family-to-Work Conflict and the Link Between Relationship Strains and Quality. J Fam Econ Iss 44, 175–192 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10834-022-09821-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10834-022-09821-8