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.

抽象的

家庭因COVID-19大流行及其相关的封锁而受到了沉重打击，但几乎尚未进行任何研究，调查与COVID-19相关的压力源，尤其是既定雇用安排的中断，如何影响夫妻的关系质量。为了更全面地说明COVID-19大流行的这种非货币成本，本研究调查了COVID-19危机期间合作伙伴的就业状况变化（尤其是家庭办公室和短期工作）是否对同居已婚夫妇和未婚夫妇的关系满意度。为此，我们利用德国家庭小组（pairfam）的独特数据，估算了固定效应回归模型; 第十一次）及其补充的COVID-19网络调查。我们观察到，在危机期间，很大一部分受访者的关系满意度发生了积极的变化（20％）或消极的变化（40％）。平均而言，无论男女，无论他们的就业状况是否经历了与COVID-19相关的变化，他们的关系满意度都下降了。尽管伴侣的就业状况几乎没有缓解受访者的就业与关系满意度之间的消极关联，但是孩子的出现似乎在一定程度上缓冲了与COVID-19相关的下降。因此，我们的结果证实了先前的发现，表明COVID-19大流行对夫妻的关系质量和更健康的家庭功能构成了威胁。