Time is socially constructed and time serves as the central organizing feature of human activities. Employment time has become more diverse in the last few decades as the result of a variety of social and economic factors, especially the expansion of a service-based, technology-intensified flexible economy. To respond to these structural changes, family time has also been undergoing reorganization and redistribution. We are not clear, however, how the temporal shifts at both the workplace and at home will affect family relationships and how men and women differ in their response to these new arrangements of time This study acknowledges the macro-structural changes over the last few decades, and it systematically investigates their consequences for family relations. Using two waves of a nationally representative data set, this study assesses three different effects in the model of the relationship between employment time and the quality of intimate relationships: (1) the direct effect of employment schedules on relationship quality; (2) the intervening effect of family time; and (3) the conditional effect of earnings and gender attitudes. The analyses are limited to dual-earner families in order to capture the joint effects of couple's joint characteristics. This study adopts a multi-dimensional approach to examine various aspects of employment scheduling and different measures of relationship quality. It shows that employment schedules, as measured by job hours, nonday shift, multiple jobs, varied schedules, weekend job, and job-related travel have limited consequences for relationship quality, but the gendered nature of employment and its effects on family relationships is evident in the results. Employment time has some impact on husbands' happiness, but husbands are more affected by their own job schedules. Husbands' and wives' job disruptions and dissatisfaction have different effects on relationship quality. While husbands' job disruptions and dissatisfaction negatively affect both partners' perceived relationship quality, wives' job disruptions and dissatisfaction increase husbands' perceived relationship quality. Moreover, couple's joint job schedules, earnings, and gender attitudes seem to operate together in determining how schedules affect relationship quality, although the results do not show consistent patterns of these interactions. This study also shows that the models determining the baseline distributions of relationship quality are different from the models predicting the changes in relationship outcomes / acase@tulane.edu
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TULANE/oai:http://digitallibrary.tulane.edu/:tulane_23495 |
| Date | January 1999 |
| Contributors | Luo, Ye (Author), Brayfield, April (Thesis advisor) |
| Publisher | Tulane University |
| Source Sets | Tulane University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | Access requires a license to the Dissertations and Theses (ProQuest) database., Copyright is in accordance with U.S. Copyright law |
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