Changes in employment and relationship satisfaction in times of the COVID-19 pandemic: Evidence from the German family Panel

ABSTRACT

Families have been hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic and its associated lockdown, but barely any research has been conducted yet, investigating how COVID-19-related stressors – and, specifically, disruptions in established employment arrangements – affected couples’ relationship quality. To account more comprehensively for such non-monetary costs of the COVID-19 pandemic, the present study investigates whether changes in partners’ employment situation during the COVID-19 crisis – particularly home-office and short-time work – had an immediate impact on the relationship satisfaction of cohabiting married and unmarried couples. To do so, we estimated fixed-effects regression models, exploiting unique data from the German Family Panel (pairfam; wave 11) and its supplementary COVID-19 web-survey. We observed a substantial proportion of respondents experiencing positive (20%) or negative (40%) changes in relationship satisfaction during the crisis. Relationship satisfaction has decreased, on average, for men and women alike, almost irrespective of whether they experienced COVID-19-related changes in their employment situation. While partners’ employment situation hardly moderated the negative association between respondents’ employment and relationship satisfaction, the presence of children seemed to buffer partly against a COVID-19-related decrease. Our results thus confirm previous findings suggesting that the COVID-19 pandemic constitutes a threat to couples’ relationship quality and healthy family functioning more generally.

KEYWORDS:

• Relationship quality
• family stress theory
• Corona
• pairfam

Acknowledgements

This paper uses data from the German Family Panel (pairfam), which is funded as long-term project by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and is coordinated by Josef Brüderl, Sonja Drobnič, Karsten Hank, Franz Neyer, and Sabine Walper. Furthermore, we thank Sandra Krapf and Michael Kühhirt for helpful methodological discussions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Note that we do not consider respondents with the following answers in the analyses: unpaid leave arrangements or unpaid vacation (n=10), layoff (n=5) or firm shutdown (n=14). Those with increased or more flexible working hours without mentioning home-office or short-time work were not considered in the analysis as well (n=83).

2 Note that 95% of men worked full-time in wave 11, while part-time work was more frequent among women (53%).

Additional information

Funding

The work of Jonathan Wörn was supported by the Research Council of Norway through its Centres of Excellence funding scheme (project number: 262700) and through the DIMJOB-Project on Social, Demographic and Health Dimensions of Technology-Induced Job Loss (project number: 296297).

Notes on contributors

Lisa Schmid

Lisa Schmid is a social scientist with a research interest in intimate relationships and family demography. As a research associate at GESIS – Leibniz-Institute for the Social Science, Mannheim (Germany) she is part of the team Family Surveys that conducts the Family Research and Demographic Analysis (FReDA) panel in Germany.

Jonathan Wörn

Jonathan Wörn is a social scientist and postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Fertility and Health at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health (Oslo). He is interested in issues related to work, family, health and ageing.

Karsten Hank

Karsten Hank is Professor of Sociology at the University of Cologne. He is Co-PI of the German Family Panel (pairfam) and the Family Research and Demographic Analysis (FReDA) panel. His research focuses on families, ageing and health.

Barbara Sawatzki

Barbara Sawatzki is a postdoctoral researcher at the German Family Panel (pairfam) in the field of family psychology. Her research interests focus on couple and family dynamics, parental well-being and role experiences.

Sabine Walper

Sabine Walper is Research Director at the German Youth Institute and Professor of Education at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich. She is Co-PI of the German Family Panel pairfam and directs the assessment program on parenting and child development. Her research focuses family diversity, family well-being, coparenting, parenting, and children’s development.