What I Love:
Beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970's married women began to enter the labor force in droves. Today, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 51.4 percent of married couples are dual-earners. Further, 77.3 percent of married mothers with children between the ages of 6 -1 7 were employed. (http://www.bls.gov/news.release/famee.nr0.htm).
What I Hate:
But why have we still not witnessed droves of husbands taking on their fair share of housework and child care, especially the repetitive, must be done this minute chores like feeding children, changing diapers, etc. Sociologists offer several explanations. The first is a classical structural argument, the world of work has not changed except to expect even more from workers. Also, most married men continue to earn more than their wives? why, it is a combination of discrimination, choice (women choose jobs with more flexibility that also pay less - think teacher). More importantly, there are great incentives for women to be employed, money. For husbands, what is the incentive to do housework. I began to think about this. Well how about their wives will be really happy and less tired, will complain less, and the couple will have a common sense of responsibility for their family?
What I Love:
In a new paper, my Professor Scott Yabiku and I explore whether sex might be an incentive. We proposed that if husbands carried more weight in the housework and child care arena, they might be appreciated by their wives, who might now be less tired and more interested in ---sex. What do we find? Not only are husbands who spend more time on housework report more frequent sex, but so are their wives. We find that greater number of hours performed by husbands and wives re associated with more frequent sex!
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
My research
For the past 18 years, I have been trying to understand why women in dual-earner couples have flooded the labor market, but not seen a commensurate increase in their husband’s participation I household labor. One reason we’ve experienced this is that there are more incentives for women enter the labor force – money.
Broadly, my research explores the intersection of families, gender, and work. My research to date has had two primary themes.
A main branch of my research focuses on couples’ perceptions of relationship quality (including perceived fairness of the division of household labor, relationship happiness, sexual frequency, relationship conflict, and shared couple time), and whether these evaluations predict the likelihood of divorce.
The second branch centers on adolescent time use -- specifically, how youth demographic characteristics (race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, gender, age, and regional residence) influence their participation in housework, paid work, and extracurricular activities.
From these two research strands emerged my most current and developing work examining the intergenerational transmission of relationship quality/conflict from parents to their emerging adult children. I received a grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) in December 2008 to study these long-term effects.
The first body of research reflects my long-term research interests in how gender influences marital evaluations and outcomes and how these may result in “his” and “her” realities of marriage. This research considers why husbands’ and wives’ perceptions of the fairness of the division of household labor that seeks to identify how spouses’ preferences for tasks, justifications, and peer comparisons influence evaluations of fairness. I use data from both the National Survey of Families and Households (NSFH) as well as from 25 in-depth interviews I conducted with dual-earner wives and husbands with young children.
With long-time collaborator Laura Sanchez, we examine whether couple disagreement on reports of marital quality including perceived fairness, marital happiness, frequency of conflict, and time spent together, predict a higher likelihood of divorce (Sanchez & Gager, 2000; Gager & Sanchez; 2002). Our most significant finding is that when husbands report more frequent shared couple time than their wives, the couple has a higher likelihood of divorce, while in couples in which wives report more time together, we find no effect.
Building on this research, collaborator Scott Yabiku (Arizona State University) and I have assessed predictors and outcomes of yet another measure of marital satisfaction -- coital frequency. In our research, we assess whether greater time spent of household labor correlates with sexual frequency, and whether this correlation varies by gender. Surprisingly, our analyses indicated that for both husbands and wives, greater participation in housework is associated with more frequent sexual relations. We theorize that these findings may suggest an underlying trait among these individuals toward achievement across multiple spheres. (Gager & Yabiku, In Press).
In a second paper, we examine how the importance of sexual activity varies across marital and cohabiting unions. Using the NSFH and discrete-time event history models, we examine the relationships between sexual frequency and union dissolution (Yabiku & Gager, In Press). Our results indicate that low sexual frequency is associated with significantly higher rates of union dissolution among cohabitors. We theorize that while cohabitation shares some similarities with the institution of marriage, marriage still presents significantly more barriers to dissolution -- including the presence of biological children and home ownership -- compared to cohabiting.
I am extending my research on marital quality to a new area, the intergenerational transmission of marital conflict and quality. This research examines if parental marital quality, sexual frequency, and/or conflict is transmitted to the next generation. A large body of research shows that children of divorced parents are slightly more prone to divorce themselves. However, some researchers have argued that it is not the divorce per se that causes many of the adverse outcomes for these children, but rather conflict between parents that may have begun long before the divorce. Until recently, valid findings on the long-term effects of parental conflict and/or relationship quality on adult child relationship outcomes have been constrained by a lack of longitudinal data. Using the newly available third wave of data from the NSFH, we are able to follow children into early adulthood to ascertain if they model their parents’ conflictual or positive relationship styles or behaviors in their own romantic relationships.
Broadly, my research explores the intersection of families, gender, and work. My research to date has had two primary themes.
A main branch of my research focuses on couples’ perceptions of relationship quality (including perceived fairness of the division of household labor, relationship happiness, sexual frequency, relationship conflict, and shared couple time), and whether these evaluations predict the likelihood of divorce.
The second branch centers on adolescent time use -- specifically, how youth demographic characteristics (race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, gender, age, and regional residence) influence their participation in housework, paid work, and extracurricular activities.
From these two research strands emerged my most current and developing work examining the intergenerational transmission of relationship quality/conflict from parents to their emerging adult children. I received a grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) in December 2008 to study these long-term effects.
The first body of research reflects my long-term research interests in how gender influences marital evaluations and outcomes and how these may result in “his” and “her” realities of marriage. This research considers why husbands’ and wives’ perceptions of the fairness of the division of household labor that seeks to identify how spouses’ preferences for tasks, justifications, and peer comparisons influence evaluations of fairness. I use data from both the National Survey of Families and Households (NSFH) as well as from 25 in-depth interviews I conducted with dual-earner wives and husbands with young children.
With long-time collaborator Laura Sanchez, we examine whether couple disagreement on reports of marital quality including perceived fairness, marital happiness, frequency of conflict, and time spent together, predict a higher likelihood of divorce (Sanchez & Gager, 2000; Gager & Sanchez; 2002). Our most significant finding is that when husbands report more frequent shared couple time than their wives, the couple has a higher likelihood of divorce, while in couples in which wives report more time together, we find no effect.
Building on this research, collaborator Scott Yabiku (Arizona State University) and I have assessed predictors and outcomes of yet another measure of marital satisfaction -- coital frequency. In our research, we assess whether greater time spent of household labor correlates with sexual frequency, and whether this correlation varies by gender. Surprisingly, our analyses indicated that for both husbands and wives, greater participation in housework is associated with more frequent sexual relations. We theorize that these findings may suggest an underlying trait among these individuals toward achievement across multiple spheres. (Gager & Yabiku, In Press).
In a second paper, we examine how the importance of sexual activity varies across marital and cohabiting unions. Using the NSFH and discrete-time event history models, we examine the relationships between sexual frequency and union dissolution (Yabiku & Gager, In Press). Our results indicate that low sexual frequency is associated with significantly higher rates of union dissolution among cohabitors. We theorize that while cohabitation shares some similarities with the institution of marriage, marriage still presents significantly more barriers to dissolution -- including the presence of biological children and home ownership -- compared to cohabiting.
I am extending my research on marital quality to a new area, the intergenerational transmission of marital conflict and quality. This research examines if parental marital quality, sexual frequency, and/or conflict is transmitted to the next generation. A large body of research shows that children of divorced parents are slightly more prone to divorce themselves. However, some researchers have argued that it is not the divorce per se that causes many of the adverse outcomes for these children, but rather conflict between parents that may have begun long before the divorce. Until recently, valid findings on the long-term effects of parental conflict and/or relationship quality on adult child relationship outcomes have been constrained by a lack of longitudinal data. Using the newly available third wave of data from the NSFH, we are able to follow children into early adulthood to ascertain if they model their parents’ conflictual or positive relationship styles or behaviors in their own romantic relationships.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)