Changes in employment and relationship satisfaction in times of the COVID-19 pandemic: Evidence from the German family Panel. (19th February 2021)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Schmid, Lisa; Wörn, Jonathan; Hank, Karsten; Sawatzki, Barbara; Walper, Sabine
• Is Part Of: European societies. Volume 23(2021)Supplement 1
• Page Start: S743
• Page End: S758
• Publication Date: 2021-02-19
• Subjects: Relationship quality -- family stress theory -- Corona -- pairfam; Sociology -- Europe -- Periodicals; Europe -- Social conditions -- 20th century -- Periodicals; 301.094
• DOI: 10.1080/14616696.2020.1836385
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1461-6696

Abstract

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.