Working Relationships: Communicative Patterns and Strategies among Couples in Everyday Life

Abstract

The recent growth in dual-income families has led to new configurations of domestic work distribution among family members. Because working parents are required to spend a great deal of time and energy at their respective jobs outside the home while also managing parenting responsibilities and household tasks, a high premium is placed on how partners negotiate and enact the division of labor inside the home. This paper draws from videotaped interviews and naturally occurring interactions in the home to explore working couples' perspectives on the challenges of managing household work and parenting. Transcripts of these videotapes are presented to examine couples' ongoing negotiation of responsibilities and expectations, with particular reference to the requests that partners make of one another and subsequent responses to these requests. Findings suggest that the degree of ambiguity in the models governing couples' expectations for and performance of housework responsibilities affects the behaviors that working parents exchange. Clear models appear to facilitate efficient management of household tasks, minimize bids for influence, and enable partners to feel effective and respected, while ambiguous models entail continued negotiation of responsibilities, repeated demands and directives, and tension within the dyad. The value of studying marital interaction in natural settings with observational methods, using principles from psychology and anthropology, is emphasized.

Keywords:

• division of labor
• dual-career couples
• marital interaction
• marriage
• observational research
• qualitative research

Acknowledgements

This study is part of an interdisciplinary, collaborative research endeavor conducted by members of the UCLA Center on Everyday Lives of Families (CELF) under the direction of Elinor Ochs. CELF is generously supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation program on the Workplace, Workforce, and Working Families, headed by Kathleen Christensen. The authors are grateful in particular to Dr. Linda Garro for the development of the Health Interview instrument. The authors are also indebted to the working families who participated in this study for opening their homes and sharing their lives. This paper corresponds with CELF Working Paper #28. Additional information about CELF can be found at www.celf.ucla.edu.

Notes

¹In the field of anthropology, one of the researcher's primary goals is to capture the participant's point of view through conducting interviews as well as participant observation (Bernard, 2000; Briggs, 1986; Fricke, 2005; Pelto & Pelto, 1978).