This study addresses how couples experiencing work travel demands talk about their relationship. Using a sample of 29 couples who experience work travel, this study examines what couples in separate interviews reported regarding their relationship, and uses mixed‐method strategies to develop a typology of couples. Three different relationship types were uncovered: aware couples who consider a variety of aspects of themselves, their partners, their relationships, and their contexts as they discuss their lives; individually focused couples who discuss their relationship only in terms of themselves and their partners; and isolated couples who discuss their relationships void of context. These findings support the notion that couples have a degree of similarity when it comes to social cognitions of their relationships.
This study’s main objective was to examine whether, in a U.S. sample, ambivalent sexism would show stronger associations with heterosexual husbands and wives’ housework division (hours and proportion) than have previous gender-ideology measures. Unlike earlier conceptions of sexism emphasizing hostile and negative stereotypical views toward women, ambivalent sexism combines the two dimensions of hostile sexism and benevolent sexism (seemingly positive views and behaviors toward women that nevertheless convey underlying paternalistic and patronizing motivations). We hypothesized that male and female respondents high in both hostile and benevolent sexism would report the typical pattern of wives’ housework exceeding their husbands’, whereas those lower in hostile or benevolent sexism would report less housework being performed by wives. Married individuals (N = 249) were recruited via advertisements on Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) platform and announcements at a university to complete an online survey. Several variables were measured, including own and spouse’s housework hours, hostile and benevolent sexism, and demographic control variables previously associated with housework allocation. An interaction emerged for women, in which those high in benevolent, but low in hostile, sexism reported performing the highest proportion of housework, whereas those low in both forms of sexism performed the lowest proportion. These results provided full or partial support for different aspects of our hypotheses. Men reported greater housework (hours and proportion) the more hours their wife worked outside the house. Discussion examines implications for ambivalent sexism theory, housework sharing, and conceptions of sexism.
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