Married Women's Employment over the Life Course: Attitudes in Cross-National Perspective

We analyze survey data from 23, largely industrialized countries on attitudes toward married women's employment at four stages of the family life course. Despite general consensus between countries, cluster and correspondence analyses show that the nations represent three distinct patterns of attitudes. There is only mixed support for the hypothesis that public opinion conforms to state welfare regime type. Instead, normative beliefs reflect both a general dimension of structural and cultural factors facilitating female labor force participation and a life course dimension specific to maternal employment. Men and women largely agree, but gender differences affect cluster membership for a few countries. Systematic analysis of a large number of countries helps to test the limits of comparative typologies and to identify anomalous cases for closer stud

The happy husband? Working wives, homemakers, and life satisfaction

Competing theoretical perspectives lead to alternative hypotheses as to whether the husbands of homemakers or men with employed wives are happier. All things considered, multi-level models using ISSP data from 29 countries find that homemakers’ husbands are modestly happier than husbands whose wives are full-time workers. This finding is robust to controls for the economic and family life variables which are hypothesized to mediate the relationship between wife’s work status and husband’s happiness. Cross-level interactions between country characteristics and wife’s work status suggest that public child care may narrow this gap in husband’s happiness

Incorporating immigrants: integrating theoretical frameworks of adaptation.

ObjectivesTo encourage research on immigrants and aging by analyzing theoretical commonalities in the two fields and identifying potential contributions of aging theories, specifically to the understanding of neglected age differences in the pace of immigrant incorporation.MethodsSurvey of the historical development of assimilation theory and its successors and systematic comparison of key concepts in aging and immigrant incorporation theories.ResultsStudies of immigrants, as well as of the life course, trace their origins to the Chicago School at the turn of the 20th century. Today, both theoretical perspectives emphasize adaptation as a time-dependent, multidimensional, nonlinear, and multidirectional process. Immigrant incorporation theories have not fully engaged with a key concern of aging theory-why there are age differences. Insights from cognitive aging and developmental biology, life-span developmental psychology, and age stratification and the life course suggest explanations for age differences in the speed of immigrant incorporation.DiscussionTheories of adaptation to aging and theories of immigrant incorporation developed so independently that they neglected the subject they have in common, namely, older immigrants. Because they address similar conceptual problems and share key assumptions, a productive dialogue between two vibrant fields is long overdue

Incorporating immigrants: integrating theoretical frameworks of adaptation.

ObjectivesTo encourage research on immigrants and aging by analyzing theoretical commonalities in the two fields and identifying potential contributions of aging theories, specifically to the understanding of neglected age differences in the pace of immigrant incorporation.MethodsSurvey of the historical development of assimilation theory and its successors and systematic comparison of key concepts in aging and immigrant incorporation theories.ResultsStudies of immigrants, as well as of the life course, trace their origins to the Chicago School at the turn of the 20th century. Today, both theoretical perspectives emphasize adaptation as a time-dependent, multidimensional, nonlinear, and multidirectional process. Immigrant incorporation theories have not fully engaged with a key concern of aging theory-why there are age differences. Insights from cognitive aging and developmental biology, life-span developmental psychology, and age stratification and the life course suggest explanations for age differences in the speed of immigrant incorporation.DiscussionTheories of adaptation to aging and theories of immigrant incorporation developed so independently that they neglected the subject they have in common, namely, older immigrants. Because they address similar conceptual problems and share key assumptions, a productive dialogue between two vibrant fields is long overdue

Poverty, household composition, and welfare states: A multi-level analysis of 22 countries

This cross-national study examines poverty of older adults and their household members and relates the risk of poverty to macro-level state approaches to welfare as well as to micro-level composition of households. Data on individuals in households containing older adults for 22 countries come from the Luxembourg Income Survey. Besides relating the risk of poverty to the type of state welfare regime, multi-level robust-cluster analysis considers household characteristics. As results show, persons in households with older adults are significantly less likely to be poor in countries with social democratic and conservative welfare regimes than in Taiwan, an exemplar of limited social welfare programs. Controlling for country differences in household composition increases the differences in poverty risks. Countries with more generous social welfare provisions have lower risks of poverty despite having household characteristics that are comparatively unfavorable. As Taiwan demonstrates, household composition, particularly a reliance on multi-generational households, compensates for limited state welfare programs

Housework task hierarchies in 32 countries

This paper examines participation in female-typed household tasks by husbands in 32 countries in the 2002 International Social Survey Program. Mokken scaling shows widespread and systematic ordering of married men’s performance of stereotypically female tasks, a hierarchy which is obscured by conventional measures of couples’ task-sharing. The hierarchy gives rise to a typology of men’s conformity to the social conventions of this task hierarchy. Multilevel, multinomial models test hypotheses on the micro-level predictors of husbands’ pattern of housework participation, as well as expectations for country differences

Apron strings of working mothers: maternal employment and housework in cross-national perspective

This paper asks whether maternal employment has a lasting influence on the division of household labor for married women and men. Employing multi-level models with 2002 ISSP survey data for 31 countries, we test the lagged accommodation hypothesis that a long societal history of maternal employment contributes to more egalitarian household arrangements. Our results find that living in a country with a legacy of high maternal employment is positively associated with housework task-sharing, even controlling for the personal socialization experience of growing up with a mother who worked for pay. In formerly socialist countries, however, there is less gender parity in housework than predicted by the high historical level of maternal employment