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Changes in employment and relationship satisfaction in times of the COVID-19 pandemic: Evidence from the German family Panel.
- Source :
- European Societies; 2021 Supplement, Vol. 23, pS743-S758, 16p
- Publication Year :
- 2021
-
Abstract
- Families have been hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic and its associated lockdown, but barely any research has been conducted yet, investigating how COVID-19-related stressors – and, specifically, disruptions in established employment arrangements – affected couples' relationship quality. To account more comprehensively for such non-monetary costs of the COVID-19 pandemic, the present study investigates whether changes in partners' employment situation during the COVID-19 crisis – particularly home-office and short-time work – had an immediate impact on the relationship satisfaction of cohabiting married and unmarried couples. To do so, we estimated fixed-effects regression models, exploiting unique data from the German Family Panel (pairfam; wave 11) and its supplementary COVID-19 web-survey. We observed a substantial proportion of respondents experiencing positive (20%) or negative (40%) changes in relationship satisfaction during the crisis. Relationship satisfaction has decreased, on average, for men and women alike, almost irrespective of whether they experienced COVID-19-related changes in their employment situation. While partners' employment situation hardly moderated the negative association between respondents' employment and relationship satisfaction, the presence of children seemed to buffer partly against a COVID-19-related decrease. Our results thus confirm previous findings suggesting that the COVID-19 pandemic constitutes a threat to couples' relationship quality and healthy family functioning more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
Details
- Language :
- English
- ISSN :
- 14616696
- Volume :
- 23
- Database :
- Complementary Index
- Journal :
- European Societies
- Publication Type :
- Academic Journal
- Accession number :
- 148882915
- Full Text :
- https://doi.org/10.1080/14616696.2020.1836385