The relationships between marital commitment and housework

Chiung-Ya Tang, Purdue University

Abstract

This study assumes that spouses are motivated to make adjustments in order to maintain their marital relationship. However, not everyone shares the same motivation to maintain their relationship. Given the importance of task sharing in maintaining marital relationships, the focus of the current study is on the relationship between marital commitment and household labor. Specifically, the current study defines marital commitment as one's motivation to maintain the marital relationship and relationship maintenance behavior as in the form of time spent in sharing housework. Utilizing the wave 2 data from the National Survey of Families and Households (Sweet & Bumpass, 1996), the analytic data consisted of 4051 pairs of married couples. This study applied the hierarchical linear modeling approach to manage the effect of dyadic interdependence on the relationship between individual's marital commitment and housework contribution. Additionally, marital commitment was examined in three forms: personal, moral, and structural commitment. Housework was categorized as low- or high-schedule-control housework. Results from the current study enhance our knowledge about the relationships between the three types of commitment and housework contribution in two ways. First, individuals' marital commitment was related to their perception of fairness in chores at home. Particular, all three types of marital commitment were positively and significantly related to the log-odds of perceiving the division of housework as "fair to both" (relative to "unfair to wife"). Second, the relationships between marital commitment and housework contribution differed depending on gender and the type of commitment. This study revealed that one's own moral commitment was most strongly related to one's own low-schedule-control housework for wives but not husbands. Additionally, while husbands' personal commitment had the strongest positive correlation with wives' hours of low-schedule-control housework, wives' moral commitment had the strongest negative correlation with husbands' low-schedule-control housework.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

MacDermid, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Families & family life|Personal relationships|Sociology

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