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Cross-National Comparison on Family Satisfaction: Super-Specialization Versus Super-Equality

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Abstract

Research has documented that women still assume the main burden of domestic tasks and childcare within the household, despite the recent changes towards a greater equality. This division of labor has clear implications in satisfaction with family life. However, little research has combined other domestic responsibilities, such as decision making and care of dependent relatives with housework to study satisfaction, from a comparative perspective. In this article, data from the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP)-2012 are used to explore the effects of a proposed index on balance in the couple, for women and men separately, through different multilevel models. The results suggest that the empowerment that could be assumed from a leading role in decision making does not improve satisfaction and that super-equality is the option yielding the highest levels of satisfaction, regardless their hours of paid-work. Differences by countries persist after controlling for individual and contextual variables, with the Latin American countries being those with the most satisfied populations.

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Notes

  1. These levels are consistent with previous works (Kornrich and Eger 2016; Notten et al. 2017).

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Acknowledgements

I’m in debt to Professor Tanja van der Lippe, from the Sociology Department of the University of Utrecht (The Netherlands) for hosting me during a research stay, funded by the Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport (Grant José Castillejo CAS2017/00248), that allowed me to work on this research. Financial support was also provided by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, CSO2013-46440-P, CSO2013-45358-R and Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness, Project No. CSO2017-86349-P.

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  1. State Law and Sociology Department, University of Malaga, Málaga, Spain

    Verónica de Miguel-Luken

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  1. Verónica de Miguel-Luken
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Appendix

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See Table 5.

Table 5 Construction of the categories for the balance index, from the standardized partial indexes on division of housework and care, and decision making
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de Miguel-Luken, V. Cross-National Comparison on Family Satisfaction: Super-Specialization Versus Super-Equality. Soc Indic Res 145, 303–327 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-019-02089-w

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