Women work-hours constraint is associated with their own depression and their partners? low relationship satisfaction: Evidence from the Growing up in Ireland Infant Cohort Study

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Author Info

Eamonn Barron Ela Polek Jennifer Mulligan Rabbit

Corresponding Author

Ela Polek
School of Psychology, University College Dublin, Ireland

A B S T R A C T

This study examined the effect of work-hours constraint, i.e., the discrepancy in women’s actual and ideal hours worked, on couple’s mental health (depression symptoms assessed with a questionnaire) and relationship satisfaction. Irish dual-earner couples (N=3,928), participants of a large cohort study the Growing Up in Ireland, were assigned to three groups based on women’s work-hours constraint: overemployed, underemployed and adequately employed. Group comparison carried out with MANCOVA indicated that adequately employed women had lower depression than over- and underemployed women, but no group differences were found in women’s relationship satisfaction. We also found lower levels of relationship satisfaction in partners of over- and underemployed women. It was hypothesized that negative crossover between partners would be accentuated under situations of greater stress (i.e., in over- and underemployed groups). Multiple group pathway analysis showed a stronger negative crossover effect from partner’s depression to women’s relationship satisfaction in the overemployed group, but not in underemployed group. These findings suggest that greater attention should be directed at a governmental and organizational level to facilitate correspondence between actual and preferred working hours for mothers of infants and their partners.

Article Info

Article Type

Research Article

Publication history

Received: Tue 10, Apr 2018
Accepted: Tue 24, Apr 2018
Published: Tue 01, May 2018

Copyright

© 2023 Ela Polek. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Hosting by Science Repository.
DOI: 10.10xx/j.PDR.2018.10.001