“He Said, She Said”: Assessing Discrepancies in Husbands' and Wives' Reports on the Division of Household Labor

Abstract

Using the National Survey of Families and Households (NSFH) data, the discrepancy in the husband's and wife's reports on household work is examined. I found that husbands tend to overestimate their own contribution (or wives underestimate the husbands' contribution), but wives do not. Husbands tend to overestimate (or wives underestimate) their wives' contribution to shopping and paying bills, suggesting the husbands' inefficiency to perform these tasks may bias their estimates. To examine various sources of the interspouse response discrepancy, multiple regression analyses are conducted. The relationship between the interspouse response discrepancy in the husband's household work time and the attitudinal variables suggests that our estimates are affected by social desirability. The relationship between the discrepancy in the wife's time and both spouses' family-role attitudes indicates that the resentment felt by each spouse in performing household work may bias their estimates in their own favor. The wife's perceived fairness is related to the interspouse discrepancy in the husband's relative share of household work. Length of marriage generally decreases the interspouse response discrepancy, suggesting that the knowledge each spouse has of each other is an important factor. Finally, various measures of the division of household labor utilizing one or two spouses' responses are regressed upon the same set of predictors. The husband's relative share, rather than each spouse's absolute time, and both spouses' combined estimate, rather than either spouse's, are better explained by the various predictors.