Globalization has led to interdependent relationships between nations and economies. As a result, there is a growing trend for organizations to send employees abroad for temporary assignments. Organizational development specialists have identified intercultural competence--a combination of affective, cognitive, and behavioral skills-as essential for executives to successfully manage the challenges of an increasingly diverse working environment. When couples are sent abroad on assignments, the employee and the non-working accompanying spouse often have very different experiences in terms of their contacts with the host culture. The employee moves into an organizational environment with a specific role and objectives. In contrast, the accompanying spouse may find him- or herself in an entirely different role. This study explored experiences of the employees and accompanying spouses in terms of their contact with the host culture and the intensity factors associated with their expatriate assignments. The participants completed the Intercultural Development Inventory (IDiv.3) to measure their intercultural competence, and engaged in a structured interview. I found similar levels of intercultural competence in both spouses. The majority scored in the ethnocentric stages of Minimization and below. Only one participant scored above Minimization in Acceptance. The findings from this study suggest that should offer support to the assignee and accompanying spouse according to their needs in that situation. Ideally the support would include both pre-departure cultural training and ongoing access to a skilled cultural mentor. The development of intercultural competence beyond Minimization requires self-reflection and an examination of assumptions, and this process is rarely followed without support or intervention.

Caregiving, specifically caregiver burden, is commonly related to decreased psychological well-being. Conversely, marital quality is positively related to psychological well-being, though existing literature presents mixed findings as to whether or not a gender difference exists in this relationship. The current study examined the relationship between objective and subjective spousal caregiver burden and psychological distress with marital quality as a moderator. Gender differences in this relationship were also explored. 1,066 spousal caregivers from the National Study of Caregiving (NSOC) were used to estimate cross-sectional moderation models and plot significant interactions in Mplus. Results indicated a significant positive relationship between subjective caregiver burden and psychological distress, and higher marital quality protected against psychological distress in this relationship. The connection between objective caregiver burden and psychological distress was not significant, and no gender differences were found in the moderation of marital quality. These findings suggest that perceptions of caregiver burden are important for the psychological health of spousal caregivers, and higher marital quality may be an effective buffer of this relationship regardless of gender. Spousal caregivers who perceive caregiving to be highly burdensome may benefit from improving their marital quality to protect against negative psychological health outcomes.

Despite the growing global momentum and commitment to addressing child malnutrition over the past few decades, undernutrition in children remains a global health crisis, particularly in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), and leads to deleterious physical and cognitive effects on children. The maternal social network has been linked to child development and health outcomes, partially through its effect on maternal depression, which in turn affects maternal behavior and child health. However, there is limited research in LMICs broadly and in Uganda specifically on the infant/young child caregiving social network, the social network through which mothers receive infant/young child caregiving assistance. This mixed-methods dissertation study piloted and refined a measure to capture this infant/young child caregiving social network in northern Uganda, and then examined sample descriptive data and the associations between networks’ characteristics and maternal depression using a social network analysis (SNA) approach. We also qualitatively examined challenges, barriers, and facilitators to infant and young child caregiving social support. Results found the social network measure to be feasible, acceptable, and comprehensible, and refinements were added to further increase clarity and suitability to the cultural context. Quantitative analyses found higher maternal depression severity to be significantly correlated with lower support on several network characteristics including the average number of caregiving tasks people assisted with, the number of people helping with advanced tasks, and the network density. Further exploration showed that higher network density was also correlated with higher number of tasks alters assisted with. Qualitative results found that mothers often experienced multiple ongoing challenges and barriers in their relationships, such as chronic spousal abuse and financial restriction, and highlighted a lack of systemic support and interventions to address these challenges. We also found several facilitators that helped mothers obtain much needed caregiving support, such as through their older children or Food for the Hungry, a non-profit organization. Though larger future studies are needed to corroborate findings, results of the study may inform interventions for maternal depression and child nutrition/health, identifying possible targets such as network density and highlighting the importance of addressing specific chronic barriers to caregiving social support. Lastly, we also developed a measure that may be used in future studies to examine caregiving networks as a mechanism of change in existing interventions.

The study of men’s health behaviors has received a great deal of attention worldwide. Studies have been conducted to identify determinates related to men’s health care usage. Masculinity and spousal control are well accepted determinates of men’s health care seeking. However, the concept of masculine capital and how it factors into men’s health care seeking has been a relatively new topic of research. The researchers do not believe there has been a study to date that examines the social control wives place on their husbands, and how that social control may influence their spouses’ health, how masculinity plays into men’s health behaviors, and how men maintain masculine capital in the face of social control, if at all. Therefore, this study sought to examine how masculinity and the social control wives placed on their husbands intersected. The purpose of this study was twofold. First, the study sought to gain a greater understanding of how wives exert social control over spousal health behaviors. Second, the study sought to examine how men maintain masculinity, specifically masculine capital in the face of social control that their wives placed on their health behaviors. Focus groups were conducted with married male participants in Cache County, Utah. Umberson’s 1987 model of social control was modified to analyze the data. The constructs of masculinity and masculine capital were added to Umberson’s original constructs of family relationships, social control, health behaviors, and physical health/mortality. In addition, the construct of social control was substituted for spousal social control. At the conclusion of the research study, the research team changed the unidirectional arrows leading from the concept of masculinity and masculine capital to bidirectional arrows to reflect the idea that masculinity and masculine capital not only affect the concept of family relationships, spousal social control, and health behaviors, but those elements in turn affect masculinity and masculine capital. The researchers found the updated proposed model to be accurate in that masculinity and masculine capital influence many realms of a man’s life and that spousal social control can have a great influence on a man’s health-related behaviors and physical health.

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Growing up in an adverse early environment is related to a number of negative health outcomes later in life, and dysregulation of the HPA axis may serve as the means by which this process occurs (Repetti et al., 2002). Indeed, early environment has been linked to altered physiological responses to general stressors in adulthood, but it remains unclear whether physiological responses to marital stress are also affected. Thus, the present work addresses two central questions in 129 newlywed couples: (1) How does growing up in an adverse early environment relate to physiological stress responses (assessed by cortisol) to a relationship conflict? (2) Does having a supportive spouse moderate this relation? The results provide some support for the link between early environment and cortisol reactivity among husbands, and marginal support for the moderating role of spousal support.

This study examined mental health outcomes for widowed Tamil women in Sri Lanka to identify any associations between type of spousal loss and several outcomes, including internalized stigma as a result of widowhood, anxiety symptoms, depressive symptoms, and posttraumatic stress symptoms. A sample of 381 Tamil female widows living in Eastern Sri Lanka were surveyed in 2016 to understand their experiences in a post-disaster and post-war context. Type of spousal loss was separated into seven categories: war-related death, death as a result of tsunami, illness-related deaths, accidental death, suicide, disappearance, and other. Path analysis was used to assess whether type of spousal loss predicts variations in symptom outcomes, controlling for time they have been bereaved, number of children, social problems, and perceived sense of community. The Conservation of Resources (COR) theory (Hobfoll, 1989) was used to conceptualize how spousal loss is connected to distress symptoms and to explain the findings. Analysis revealed that the only types of spousal loss which associated with significant variation in symptom distress were spousal loss as a result of accident and "other" causes. Specifically, accidental causes of spousal death were associated with lower levels of depression, and "other" causes of death were associated with lower levels of depression and anxiety as compared to all other causes of death. In addition, the control variables of sense of community and social problems predicted significant variation in symptom distress such that higher levels of sense of community were associated with lower levels of depression, anxiety, and posttraumatic stress symptoms, and social problems were associated with higher levels of all measured types of mental health distress symptoms.

The aim of this study was to explore spouses' roles in a relationship with a partner with dementia and to understand spouses' situations at home. The study was focusing on gender roles and authority in relationships between the spousal caregivers and their partners with dementia. The method used for this study was qualitative content analysis and the data was collected from seven interviews with spousal caregivers about their roles as partners of people with dementia. By critically examining Twiggs three models, carers as resources, caregivers as co-workers and carers as co-clients, we have been able to visualize how spouses can look upon their role to their partners with dementia. A fourth model has been added to a modification of Twiggs models, because spouse's roles didn't fit into any of Twiggs already existing models. There is not a big gender difference about spousal care for a partner, and the caregivers are in a highly extent affected of the situation with a partner with dementia. Spouses role can fit in with partners as carers, which is a fourth model added to Twiggs original three models.

Paper [I] studies equality of opportunity in Sweden. The distinction between circumstances that constrain an individual’s opportunities and the individual choices also affecting a particular outcome is the main idea of theories of equality of opportunity. In this study, equality of opportunity is analyzed for Swedish data using a large set of variables indicating different circumstances likely to affect an individual’s opportunities. A semiparametric model is estimated to allow for a possible nonlinear relation between parental income and the income of the adult child. The reason is a hypothesis that a constrained investment behavior would make the relationship nonlinear. The results indicate significant inequality of opportunities. However, they do not indicate a nonlinear relationship between parental income and the income of the adult child. Thus, the hypothesis that low income families will have a constrained investment behavior in human capital formation is brought into question as the explanation of intergenerational income correlation in Sweden. Paper [II] focuses on the persistence of poverty in Sweden. The purpose is to distinguish between two different reasons why poverty could persist on an individual level. By using a sample of identical twins, this study takes advantage of the similarity within pairs of twins to separate family specific heterogeneity from true state dependence, where the experience of poverty leads to a higher risk of future poverty. The results, based on a four variate probit model, show the importance of true state dependence in poverty. When using the information on whether an individual received social assistance as a measure of poverty, family specific heterogeneity explains between 24 and 31 percent of the poverty persistence in the sample. Paper [III] analyzes the consequences of unemployment for a Swedish sample of couples. The purpose is to estimate the possible income replacement that a spouse can provide. Unemployment can also affect the probability that the couples split up. Since not all couples remain in the analysis, a potential selection problem can occur. To deal with this problem, and also to take care of unobserved heterogeneity, a sample selection model for panel data is estimated. The results indicate that it is necessary to take into account the selection problem. A period in unemployment is found to be correlated with a higher female income only in the case of men who earned a fairly high income before becoming unemployed. Women who earned a fairly low income and were subject to a long period of unemployment are found to be compensated by a higher male income.

The aims of this study were to explore partners' experiences of living with a loved one with bipolar disorder and how they coped with these experiences. Another aim was to explore whether these individuals felt that Counselling Psychologists could play a role with care-giving tasks and their own psychological needs. Five individuals, who were currently living with, or had been living with, a partner with bipolar disorder, volunteered and participated in a semi-structured interview. These interviews were transcribed and analysed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) as described by Smith, Flowers and Larkin (2009). A table of super-ordinate and sub-ordinate themes was created as a result of this analysis. Partners' experiences are characterised by various phases which partners could move around and between. This was referred to as the 'cycle of changing illness awareness'. This theme adds to the existing literature. As partners moved around and between these phases they experienced different emotions, employed different coping strategies and had experiences of being 'in it together' interchangeably with being 'isolated and alone'. This research concludes that partners' experiences of caring for a loved one with bipolar disorder do not follow a linear, predictable path and as a result, professionals working with caregivers need to be aware of which phases of the 'cycle of changing illness awareness' partners are in when offering interventions. The analysis also suggests that partners cope differently when their loved one is manic and depressed. However, further exploration is still needed.