Integrative Body–Mind–Spirit Approach to Enhance Women’s Well-being

Abstract

Abstract In the early 1980s, research on the effects of multiple roles on women’s health focused on the number of roles women engaged in. Within the context of two competing hypotheses, women’s psychological well-being may be increased by less life involvement, that is, the scarcity hypothesis, or increased by more life involvement, that is, the expansion hypothesis, (Froberg, Gjerdingen, & Preston, 1986). In later years, the direction of research on women’s multiple roles shifted to analyzing the effects of specific role combinations. Individuals tend to internalize the multiple roles they play and the statuses they occupy in their social networks; however, there are fewer psychological advantages of holding multiple roles for women than there are for men. Numerous studies have been done on examining the distressing aspects of enacting the specific primary roles of worker, wife, and mother. Among women, simultaneously attending to the demands of multiple roles showed immediate negative effects on their psychological well-being (Williams, Suls, Alliger, Learner, & Wan, 1991). This gender difference in distress may contribute to male–female differences in perception of the nature of work–parent conflict, attributions of responsibility for marital problems (Chan, Chan et al., 2001), feelings of guilt, and self-evaluation as parents and spouses (Simon, 1995).