Role quality, multiple role involvement, and psychological well-being in midlife women.

Abstract

Women's occupancy of the social roles of paid worker, wife, and mother, and the quality of their experience in these three were examined in relation to psychological well-being. Data were from a disproportionate random sample (N — 238) of Caucasian women ages 35 to 55. Well-being was measured by indices of self-esteem, depression, and pleasure; pleasure was assessed by a scale consisting of single-item measures of happiness, satisfaction, and optimism. Role quality was measured by scales developed for this study that assessed the balance between the positive and negative attributes women perceived in their roles. Hierarchical regression analyses controlling for age, education, and income indicated that role occupancy per se was unrelated to well-being with one exception: occupying the role of paid worker significantly predicted self-esteem. In contrast, the three role quality variables were significant predictors of the well-being indices, with one exception: quality of experience in the role of mother did not predict pleasure. Overall, the findings suggest the importance of qualitative rather than quantitative aspects of role involvement and the need to examine different dimensions of well-being in relation to social roles. In a review of the literature on women's social Long and Porter (1984) point to the existence of a kind of sex segregation in research and theory on multiple roles. For men, multiple roles have been seen as beneficial; Gove and Tudor (1973), for example, attributed the better mental health of men compared to women to their participation in both family and paid work roles. The topic of dual roles, in contrast, has been seen as a woman's issue; for women, the role of paid worker is assumed to be added on to the normative condition of being a wife, mother, and homemaker. Role overload, role conflict, guilt, anxiety, and other hazards are expected to follow, resulting in impaired well-being. Two major hypotheses have been put forward concerning the relation of role involvement to well-being. The scarcity hypothesis (Marks, 1977), put forth by Goode (1960) and others, assumes that the social structure normally creates overly demanding role obligations, the more so the more roles one occupies. Because human energy is limited, well-being is impaired by the overload and conflict inherent in numerous, often incompatible roles. In contrast to this view, the enhancement hypothesis (Marks, 1977; Sieber, 1974) emphasizes the benefits rather than the costs of multiple role involvement: status, privileges, increased self-esteem, the ability to trade off undesirable components of roles. Like placing one's eggs in many baskets,