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Changes in employment and relationship satisfaction in times of the COVID-19 pandemic: Evidence from the German Family Panel
[journal article]
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 ... view more
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.... view less
Keywords
quality; job situation; satisfaction; epidemic; Federal Republic of Germany; family; partner relationship; short-time work; psychological stress
Classification
Family Sociology, Sociology of Sexual Behavior
Free Keywords
relationship quality; family stress theory; Corona; German Family Panel (pairfam), wave 11
Document language
English
Publication Year
2020
Page/Pages
p. 1-16
Journal
European Societies (2020)
ISSN
1469-8307
Status
Published Version; peer reviewed