Spouse, parent, worker: Role commitments and role-related experiences in the construction of adults' well-being.

Abstract

This study examined relations between adults' role strain, anxiety, and depression and 5 aspects of role-related experience: commitment; demands, satisfactions, and evaluations; and social support for role-related activities. Participants were 102 men and 194 women, all employed, in dual-earner marriages, and parenting a preschool child. High commitment to roles was not uniformly associated with greater well-being (e.g., a component of work commitment reflecting absorption in work was linked with higher role strain in men). Diverse sources of support were linked with women's psychological states, but men's well-being was responsive chiefly to wives' support. Age, in this 30-something sample, and role-tenure had relatively little impact on the relations between role-related experiences and well-being. The changing nature of families and the activities in which adult family members engage and the changing gender composition of the work force and the work it performs virtually ensure continuing interest in the relations between family life and work life and between experiences in these settings and adults' psychological well-being. Gaining a better understanding of experiences that are consequential for men's and women's wellbeing is an important goal in its own right. Insofar as adults' well-being may impinge on their functioning as parents and thus have implications for the quality of children's lives (Dodge, 1990; Hock & DeMeis, 1990), this objective becomes doubly important. Early research on the impacts of work and family experiences on men's and women's well-being took a role-count approach, with debate centering on whether occupancy of multiple roles (e.g., parent, spouse, and worker) drained individuals' time and energy resources and reduced their well-being or, in addition to creating demands on resources, provided additional avenues of gratification and social rewards that led to improvements in well-being (see Baruch & Barnett, 1986,1987, for a fuller discussion of the scarcity and enhancement hypotheses). Considerable attention was directed toward the possibility that women