Roles and relationships in the family

How have roles and relationships changed in the family

- Multiple sociologists observed significant change in conjugal roles over last 50 years.

- Conjugal roles are roles of men and women within marriage.

- Shift from segregated conjugal roles where husbands and wives performed separate types of work and often had separate leisure activities.

- To joint conjugal roles where husbands and wives both perform paid work, share the unpaid work in the home and have shared leisure and social activities.

Who opposes changes in the family

New right and Functionalists would contradict this view because it goes against biological roles

How are domestic divisions of labour shared in the family

Women face dual burden:

1. Working full time like men

2. Undertake majority of housework and childcare

what did the 2012 British Social Attitudes survey (Park) find

- Most surveys tend to agree women do considerably more hours of unpaid work than men

- Men spend average of 8 hours per week doing domestic labour

- Women spend average of 13 hours a week

- Some studies suggested that men tend to overestimate own participation while women tend to underestimate

Gershuny - time budget research and lagged adaptation

- Compared data collected of daily time spent doing activities from 1970s to 1997

- 1997 women still did more than 60% of domestic work but had been gradual increase in men's participation

- However, women had increased participation in paid work over same period

- Overall time spent on all work increased slightly

- Women's roles have changed more quickly

- Women have entered workforce in large numbers, but men slow to adapt to this situation

- Suggested next generation we are likely to see men taking bigger share of housework and childcare

Dunscombe and Marsden - triple shift

- Women also do emotion work

- Giving love, understanding, praise, reassurance and attention, all of which is required to maintain successful relationships

- Emotion work happens alongside paid work and domestic work in the house

How does 'emotion work' contribute an additional shift

- Interviewed 40 established white couples separately and together

- Many women felt their emotion work kept their relationships together

- Can include discussion on personal issues, organising events where couple could express intimacy or expressing love and care

- Women dissatisfied with limited contribution of men

- Most men denied any problem and felt contribution was in terms of paid jobs and ability to earn money

- Having finished shift of paid work, women come home to complete housework and then undertake emotion work as well

Hakim (2010) criticises feminist view of division of labour

- Analysed data from time budget studies across Europe and argued many men already do more than their fair share

- She states 'on average women and men across Europe do the same total number of productive work hours, once paid jobs and unpaid household work are added together'

- Roughly 8 hours a day

- Argued we need to add all types of work together in comparing what men and women do

- Men do substantially more hours of paid work

- Women's time divided more evenly between paid and unpaid work

- Also found pattern of equality in total productive work hours is found among couples aged 20-40 and those aged 40-50 so reasonably consistent across lifecycle

Harkness (2008) support Hakim's theory

- British men work longer hours in total than women do when there are children in the house

- Largely because men often work more overtime to boost family income at this stage

- Wives switch to part time jobs, or drop out of employment