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Relationship-Status and Work-Life Balance Satisfaction: Cross-Sectional and Longitudinal Analyses

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Abstract

Marriage rates are declining in prevalence in the Western world, and relationship formats are more varied. These significant demographic changes demand new, more nuanced analyses sensitive to relationship-status variations. Moreover, the different groups may have differing work-behavior patterns, influencing and interacting with their work-life balance differently. Thus, using longitudinal analyses of a representative sample of the German population (25,871 observations, 6,280 unique individuals) from the Panel Analysis of Intimate Relationships and Family Dynamics (pairfam) studies, this study disentangles work-life factors and shows their different effects on four marital/relationship-status groups: married people, singles, LAT couples, and cohabitating couples. In addition, four different work mechanisms are modeled here to estimate their separate effect on the four groups: after-hours working, workload, weekly working hours, and meeting colleagues after work. Following this four-on-four matrix, findings show that all unmarried groups are less affected by weekly working hours compared with the married group, singles with a partner are less affected by working after 7 PM compared with unpartnered singles and married people, all groups are negatively affected by workload, and meeting colleagues after work has a relatively positive effect on unpartnered singles. Thus, this study advances the understanding of unmarried people within the labor market.

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  1. The Federmann School of Public Policy and Government, The Hebrew University, Campus Mount Scopus, 91905, Jerusalem, Israel

    Elyakim Kislev

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Appendix

Appendix

Tables 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9

Table A1 Panel Data Analyses of Work-Life Balance (WLB) Satisfaction by Relationship-status, Age 18 and above, women only, Between-Effects
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Table A2 Panel Data Analyses of Work-Life Balance (WLB) Satisfaction by Relationship-status, Age 18 and above, men only, Between-Effects
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Table A3 Panel Data Analyses of Work-Life Balance (WLB) Satisfaction by Relationship Status in Interactions with Work Components, Age 18 and Above¸ Between-Effects
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Table A4 Multivariate Regression analysis of Work-Life Balance (WLB) Satisfaction by Relationship Status in Interaction with Gender, Age 18 and above
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Table A5 Multivariate Regressions of Work Stressor by Relationship Status in Interaction with Gender, Age 18 and above
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Table A6 Correlation matrix by wave, age 18 and above
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Kislev, E. Relationship-Status and Work-Life Balance Satisfaction: Cross-Sectional and Longitudinal Analyses. Applied Research Quality Life 18, 1115–1142 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11482-022-10137-w

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