ANAHEIM, Calif. -- Marriage partners who feel burdened by their hours at work report the lowest quality of life among working couples, according to a new Cornell study.
These couples tend to experience more conflict between work and personal life, more stress, and more feelings of overload as well as lack of control and mastery of their lives than other working couples. And those partners with very demanding jobs are, by far, at the highest risk for low life quality, according to sociologist Phyllis Moen. "The fact is that in contemporary working-couple households, at least one spouse typically puts in long hours (more than 45 hours a week)," said Moen.
Moen is director of the Cornell Employment and Family Careers Institute, funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the Ferris Family Professor of Life Course Studies.
Presenting her findings at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting last week, Moen said: "Married working couples who are launching young families are the ones who tend to work the longest hours and, therefore, report the lowest quality of life among working couples." This suggests, she said, that it's not only parenting but also job responsibilities and expectations "that make these years of career building especially trying." She spoke during a panel session titled "The Time Squeeze: Work/Family Strategies in the Next Century," which she organized.
On the other hand, Moen said, marriage partners who both work full time (but not longer) report the highest quality of life. Part-time work by one or both spouses is not linked to higher life quality, possibly because of the nature of part-time work that is available, she said.
Moen worked with Yan Yu, assistant professor of anthropology/sociology at Grand Valley State University in Grand Rapids, Mich., to analyze data on 1,679 working couples at eight life stages from the 1992 National Study of the Changing Workforce. She sought to evaluate the work arrangements of working couples to determine which partners reaped the highest quality of life.
"What matters most for life quality, we've found, is not only work hours, but also having a supportive supervisor," Moen said. Surprisingly, marriages in which the husband is a professional and the working wife is not, also rated high in the life-quality area, Moen said.
"This should not be surprising, given that the workplace as well as society is geared for the traditional bread-winner model, that is, having only one spouse -- typically the husband -- heavily invested in their jobs. This outdated structure pigeonholes workers as if they were without family responsibilities or other non-work personal involvements," she added.
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