Research on work-family conflict has focused on individuals, and little is known as to how spouses perceive each other’s work-family conflict and how inaccuracies of such perceptions relate to relationship quality. Using a national sample of dual-earner married and cohabiting couples (N = 545), we found that over half of spouses overestimate or underestimate each other’s work-family conflict. H...

As women's labor-force participation and earnings have grown, so has the likelihood that wives outearn their husbands. A common concern is that these couples may be at heightened risk of divorce. Yet with the rise of egalitarian marriage, wives' relative earnings may be more weakly associated with divorce than in the past. We examine trends in the association between wives' relative earnings an...

War captivity is a highly traumatic experience which sometimes has deleterious effects on both ex-POWs and their wives. This study examined the relationships between posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms and differentiation among male ex-prisoners of war (ex-POWs; n = 103), their wives (n = 82), and comparable controls. Results show that ex-POWs and their wives endorsed more PTSD sympto...

A couple-level analysis with a sample of 105 female reduced-hours physicians and their fulltime–employed husbands found individual and spouse crossover effects: Each spouse’s ratings of own schedule fit predict own job-role quality; wives’ ratings of partner/family schedule fit predict their marital-role quality, with a similar trend for husbands; husbands’ ratings of own schedule fit predict w...

BACKGROUND Our aim was to assess the mortality of fishermen and fishermen's wives in Finland, presuming that the mortality reflects their high consumption of contaminated fish. METHODS All Finnish fishermen, registered since 1980, were identified from the Professional Fishermen Register (N = 6410), and the fishermen's wives from the national population register (N = 4260). The cohorts were in...

This study brings together the literature on social network approaches to social capital and health and on migration and HIV risks to examine how non-migrating wives of labor migrants use their personal networks to cope with perceived risks of HIV infection in rural southern Mozambique. Using data from a 2006 survey of 1,680 women and their dyadic interactions, we compare the composition of per...

This study was designed to examine the role women's husbands may play in determining their body satisfaction. One hundred and seventy-two (172; mean age = 37.53 years) European American women's body satisfaction, their perceptions of their husbands' satisfaction with their bodies, and their husbands' actual satisfaction with their bodies were assessed using the Body Figure Rating Scale; women's...

In a sample of married couples, approximately half of which included a wife with major depression, we evaluated whether mood reactivity (i.e., preto post-interaction changes in mood) to marital conflict resolution interactions was associated with marital dissatisfaction, depression, or both. In support of the marital discord model of depression, results indicated that greater marital dissatisfa...

Stress spillover in marriage was examined within a stress-buffering conceptual framework in a multiwave, longitudinal sample of newlywed husbands and wives (N = 101 couples). Spousal support, chronic role strain, and marital satisfaction were assessed 4 times over 3 years and analyzed via actor-partner interdependence model and growth curve analytic techniques. Greater escalation in husbands' r...