Abstract
Previous research shows that commuting is often accompanied by increased stress, exhaustion and less time for partners and children. On the basis of the life course approach and work-life balance theory, we argue that these negative outcomes also influence the dynamics of the social relationships of individuals who live together in the same household. Most research has focused on the commuter, whereas less is known regarding how commuting affects the subjective well-being of other household members, in this case, the partner. Our paper contributes to this research gap by analysing the interdependencies of parents who commute in regard to their overall and domain-specific well-being. We use pooled data from three waves of the German Family Panel, which includes standardised information related to working conditions and job-related mobility as well as family dynamics from both parents’ perspectives. The resulting subsample has N = 2443 dyads in families. Our dyadic analysis shows negative spillover effects of commuting times on all included measures of subjective well-being, but only for mothers. Moreover, there are two crossover effects: a negative crossover effect from mothers commuting on fathers’ satisfaction with family life and a positive crossover effect of fathers commuting on mothers’ satisfaction with social contacts outside the family (i.e. friends). Overall, the findings indicate that mothers own commuting works as a more general burden, whereas fathers seem to suffer more from their partner’s commuting time than vice versa.
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Notes
The study is led by Josef Brüderl, Karsten Hank, Johannes Huinink, Bernhard Nauck, Franz Neyer and Sabine Walper and is funded as a long-term project by the German Research Foundation (DFG).
Detailed information regarding data management is presented in Brüderl et al. (2010), pairfam Data Manual, Mannheim Centre for European Social Research, Technical Reports.
In the present study, all models are fitted with robust standard errors; thus, the fit statistic shows the “standardized root mean squared residual” (SRMR) and the “coefficient of determination” (commonly referred to as “R-squared”). The SRMR is an index based on the residual matrix that shows the difference between the observed and predicted covariance. A perfect fit would be an SRMR = 0; thus, a small value is a good fit. Values less than 0.08 are acceptable (Reinecke 2014). r2-Values represent the proportion of the variance in the dependent variable that may be explained by the independent variables.
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Brömmelhaus, A., Feldhaus, M. & Schlegel, M. Family, Work, and Spatial Mobility: The Influence of Commuting on the Subjective Well-Being of Couples. Applied Research Quality Life 15, 865–891 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11482-019-9710-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11482-019-9710-z