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OBJECTIVES: Metastatic prostate cancer is a serious disease that affects both men and their intimate partners. We explored the perceptions of men who have been treated for metastatic prostate cancer and the views of their wives regarding the changes that were caused by prostate cancer and its treatment. STUDY DESIGN: We conducted retrospective focus group interviews with married men and separate focus groups with their wives. POPULATION: Twenty married men (11 white and 9 African American) with an average age of 69 years (range=60-82 years) and 7 of the wives (5 white and 2 African American) participated in our study. Thirteen of the men were treated with orchiectomy, and 7 received monthly hormone ablation therapy. OUTCOMES MEASURED: We compared the accounts of husbands and wives concerning the diagnosis and treatment of prostate cancer. RESULTS: The participants' accounts indicate little spousal communication about the implications of prostate cancer on their lives. In particular, couples appear to talk little about their emotions, worries, and fears. CONCLUSIONS: Although wives have a profound interest in their husbands' prostate cancer, actual communication about the disease, its treatment, and the feelings it evokes may be less than we believe. Noncommunication in marriages might indicate that these couples are at increased risk for poor adjustment to prostrate cancer.

The literature suggests that gender ideology-how a person identifies herself or himself in terms of marital and family roles traditionally linked to gender-is related to the division of labor in the home. In this article I assert that it is not sufficient to merely examine the main effects of wives' and husbands' gender ideologies. Rather, it is essential to consider the interaction between the ideologies of wives and their husbands in order to understand how a division of household labor emerges. I hypothesize that a husband's gender ideology will not be related to the division of household labor for men married to traditional wives, but that it will be for men with egalitarian wives. An empirical test using data provided by 2,719 married couples from the National Survey of Families and Households confirms this hypothesis. Even after controlling for measures of market- and marital-specific capital, wives' and husbands' gender ideologies interact in terms of their effects on the division of household labor. Husbands do relatively little domestic labor unless both they and their wives are relatively egalitarian in their beliefs about gender and marital roles. Gender-based inequality in the division of household labor has become a key issue for scholars of marriage and the family. One of the more intriguing findings in this literature has been the relative insensitivity of the division of household labor to recent increases in labor force participation. Even though married mothers are more than twice as likely to be employed full-time today as in 1970, the division of household labor seems to have changed hardly at all: Married men still do relatively little domestic labor. Although it appears that husbands of employed women contribute more hours of household than do husbands of nonemployed women, these differences tend to be relatively small. Demo and Acock (1993), for example, found that although husbands of employed wives contribute on average 4.3 more hours per week to chores than do husbands of nonemployed wives, the division of household labor remains strikingly unequal: Employed wives' proportion of total hours spent on household chores is still about 72%, compared with about 81% for nonemployed wives. The consensus of the empirical literature is that the division of household labor tends to be relatively traditional-that is, the wife performs a far greater proportion of household tasks than does her husband-in households where the wife earns more than her husband (Atkinson & Boles, 1984) and even in households where the husband is not employed (Brayfield, 1992). This combination of market and nonmarket is likely to force married women into working what Hochschild calls the second-shift (Hochschild, 1989b). Not only do married women perform far more household labor than their husbands, but the kinds of household tasks performed by wives and husbands differ. Many researchers (for example, Blair & Lichter, 1991; Brayfield, 1992; Lennon & Rosenfeld, 1994; Mederer, 1993) note that household labor remains highly segregated by sex. Those tasks that have been traditionally thought of as women's work (for example, cooking, laundry, housecleaning) are performed primarily by women, and tasks such as yard and auto maintenance are done primarily by men. Lennon and Rosenfeld report that men do about 70% of the traditionally male tasks, and women perform about 75% of the traditionally female tasks. To explain these inequalities in task allocation and in task type, social scientists have developed at least four major conceptual approaches. The relative resources (or resource bargaining) approach takes an exchange-based perspective. The division of household labor is seen to result from implicit negotiation between spouses over inputs (e.g., earnings) and outcomes (e.g., who does the housework) in the household. In general, the research literature supports this perspective (see, for example, Blair & Lichter, 1991; Ferree, 1991; Kamo, 1988). …

Emotion regulation is generally thought to be a critical ingredient for successful interpersonal relationships. Ironically, few studies have investigated the link between how well spouses regulate emotion and how satisfied they are with their marriages. We utilized data from a 13-year, 3-wave longitudinal study of middle-aged (40-50 years old) and older (60-70 years old) long-term married couples, focusing on the associations between downregulation of negative emotion (measured during discussions of an area of marital conflict at Wave 1) and marital satisfaction (measured at all 3 waves). Downregulation of negative emotion was assessed by determining how quickly spouses reduced signs of negative emotion (in emotional experience, emotional behavior, and physiological arousal) after negative emotion events. Data were analyzed using actor-partner interdependence modeling. Findings showed that (a) greater downregulation of wives' negative experience and behavior predicted greater marital satisfaction for wives and husbands concurrently and (b) greater downregulation of wives' negative behavior predicted increases in wives' marital satisfaction longitudinally. Wives' use of constructive communication (measured between Waves 1 and 2) mediated the longitudinal associations. These results show the benefits of wives' downregulation of negative emotion during conflict for marital satisfaction and point to wives' constructive communication as a mediating pathway.

Husbands and Wives. Dynamics of Married Living. R. O. Blood & D. M. Wolfe. New York: The Free Press. 1960. The bright red paperback copy of Blood and Wolfe's Husbands and Wives has been with me since my graduate student days. Unlike many other volumes from the 1960s, it did not end up in donations to libraries or book sales but remained on my shelves and, I am confident, on the shelves of most of my colleagues. What contribution did this book make to ensure its stance as a classic work in the literature? The contribution of Husbands and Wives was theoretical, methodological, and empirical. From a purely empirical perspective, it is probably accurate to say that Blood and Wolfe brought representative survey research to the field. This was surely an accomplishment in an era dominated by Parsons' mostly theoretical treatises on the family. It was also a necessary contribution in a public opinion and scientific context characterized by doubts about the family's functions and survival. Indeed, a thorough characterization of the changing family was one major goal of the book: Regardless of the causes, the fact remains that families are today from what they once were-except nobody seems to know exactly how they are different (p. 3). What follows is a description of marriages, based on a representative sample of 909 wives in Detroit and southeastern Michigan. The study addresses a wide range of topics: the division of labor, employment and occupational mobility, childbearing and childrearing, companionship, love, and stresses and strengths of marriages. It also addresses variations in these dimensions (mostly in cross-tabular form) by major demographic and other characteristics such as urban-rural background, education, wife's employment status, the husband's occupation, or life-cycle stage. Because large-scale survey research can rarely achieve the same in-depth information as qualitative studies, Husbands and Wives perhaps lacks the detail shown in other classical works of the era, such as Cuber and Harroff's The Significant Americans, but there was and continues to be a need for such representative and broad studies as documented by the current popularity of the National Survey of Families and Households (NSFH). With its emphasis on a representative and broad approach to the field, Husbands and Wives may very well constitute the first forerunner of the NSFH. The major theoretical contribution of the volume is the theory of power, and it is perhaps this theory that has kept Husbands and Wives in the reference lists even of current publications. Resource theory contends that spouses' power is contingent on the resources they bring to the marriage and provide to their partner. Even though it has undergone many extensions and modifications, practically since its inception (SafiliosRothschild, 1970; Szinovacz, 1987), resource theory remains one of the cornerstones of theorizing on marital power relations (Sabatelli & Shehan, 1993). It could well be said that with this theory, Blood and Wolfe anticipated (remember that the survey was conceived in the mid-1950s) the more general exchange theory that developed during the late 1950s and 1960s in the sociological and sociopsychological literature (e.g., Blau, 1964; Homans, 1958; Thibaut & Kelley, 1959). …

Abstract The clearly defined work and family roles of the traditional American family model-husbands as breadwinners and wives as homemakers-have been replaced by a model where both husbands and wives are employed, creating the need to re-negotiate family roles. The current study examined: (1) differences in perceived decision-making, gender-role attitudes, division of household labor and perceived marital equity in dual-earner husbands and wives (n = 233); and (2) the impact of perceived decision-making, gender-role attitudes, and division of household labor on perceived marital equity. Findings indicated that decision-making, low-control household labor, and high-control household labor differed significantly between husbands and wives. Wives spent more time in household labor and were much more likely to be involved in low-control household tasks. Perceptions of marital equity were influenced by decision-making and time spent in low-control household tasks for both husbands and wives.

BACKGROUND: Few studies have explored the effect of a gender-specific infertility diagnosis on the responses of couples in Taiwan. The purpose of this research was to compare the differences in distress, marital and sexual satisfaction in husbands and wives based on an infertility diagnosis. METHODS: Three structured questionnaires were used. RESULTS: Female members of couples in which both partners were infertile expressed less marital and sexual satisfaction than their husbands. No differences in marital and sexual satisfaction were found between wives and husbands with unexplained infertility. Only wives with a diagnosed female infertility expressed higher distress to infertility than their husbands. Although no differences in psychosocial responses were found among husbands, regardless of the diagnosis, wives with a diagnosed female infertility experienced higher distress in self-esteem and less satisfaction in acceptance by in-laws than wives experiencing a diagnosed male infertility. CONCLUSIONS: These findings suggest that the diagnosis of infertility is an important factor in assessing the differences in infertility distress and marital and sexual satisfaction between husbands and wives. Health professionals can explain the gender differences when counselling infertile couples and encourage them to share each other's feelings, which may help couples to cope with the communication problems they may experience.

In a study in 29 health centre districts in Japan 91 540 non-smoking wives aged 40 and above were followed up for 14 years (1966-79), and standardised mortality rates for lung cancer were assessed according to the smoking habits of their husbands. Wives of heavy smokers were found to have a higher risk of developing lung cancer and a dose-response relation was observed. The relation between the husband's smoking and the wife's risk of developing lung cancer showed a similar pattern when analysed by age and occupation of the husband. The risk was particularly great in agricultural families when the husbands were aged 40-59 at enrolment. The husbands' smoking habit did not affect their wives' risk of dying from other disease such as stomach cancer, cervical cancer, and ischaemic heart disease. The risk of developing emphysema and asthma seemed to be higher in non-smoking wives of heavy smokers but the effect was not statistically significant. The husband's drinking habit seemed to have no effect on any causes of death in their wives, including lung cancer. These results indicate the possible importance of passive or indirect smoking as one of the causal factors of lung cancer. They also appear to explain the long-standing riddle of why many women develop lung cancer although they themselves are non-smokers. These results also cast doubt on the practice of assessing the relative risk of developing lung cancer in smokers by comparing them with non-smokers.

This study investigated the emotional expression and physiological reactivity of husbands and wives as they discussed a salient interpersonal issue. Emotional behavior of speaker and listener was coded from videotapes with the Couples Interaction Scoring System (CISS). The results indicated that wives' speech was characterized by less neutral and more negative behavior compared to husbands' speech. Wives also reciprocated their husbands' positive and negative speech, while husbands did not reciprocate their wives' speech. Finally, husbands had a greater tendency to display skin potential responses to their wives' negative speech than did wives in response to their husbands' negative speech. The pattern of results was discussed in relation to sex-role stereotypes for expressive behavior and to discharge models of emotion.

The specialization and trading model-the dominant theoretical perspective on marital stability-posits a positive effect of wives' economic independence on the risk of divorce. Prior evidence for this association is mixed, however. This analysis explores the possibility that the effect of wives' labor force supply and educational attainment on marital dissolution varies across historical periods and across the marital life course. Event-history analyses of data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics for 3,523 married couples observed between 1969 and 1993 reveal that the impact of wives' employment on marital dissolution has become increasingly positive, Moreover, as marriages age, the positive effect of wives' employment on divorce becomes stronger and the negative impact of wives' education becomes weaker, Possible explanations for these varying effects include the development of institutional supports for unmarried working mothers, the increasing adoption of nontraditional gender-role ideologies, and trends in workplace sex segregation

Conventional models of stress and coping are highly individualistic and give little attention to circumstances and involvement with others. A more contextual perspective on wives of patients who had suffered myocardial infarctions was adopted in this study. Wives' distress was related to the character of the infarction, but initial contact with medical personnel and marital quality each had independent contributions. Other analyses related wives' distress to their and the patients' coping. Wives' protective buffering of patients had a positive relationship with their own distress, even though Smith & Coyne (1988) have shown it contributes to patients' self-efficacy. Results suggest the need to acknowledge the limitations on adaptation imposed by health and the health care system. Also, initial conditions set a trajectory for later adaptation and there may be tradeoffs between preserving one's own well-being and contributing to a partner's efficacy.

BACKGROUND: Military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan have involved the frequent and extended deployment of military personnel, many of whom are married. The effect of deployment on mental health in military spouses is largely unstudied. METHODS: We examined electronic medical-record data for outpatient care received between 2003 and 2006 by 250,626 wives of active-duty U.S. Army soldiers. After adjustment for the sociodemographic characteristics and the mental health history of the wives, as well as the number of deployments of the personnel, we compared mental health diagnoses according to the number of months of deployment in Operation Iraqi Freedom in the Iraq-Kuwait region and Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan during the same period. RESULTS: The deployment of spouses and the length of deployment were associated with mental health diagnoses. In adjusted analyses, as compared with wives of personnel who were not deployed, women whose husbands were deployed for 1 to 11 months received more diagnoses of depressive disorders (27.4 excess cases per 1000 women; 95% confidence interval [CI], 22.4 to 32.3), sleep disorders (11.6 excess cases per 1000; 95% CI, 8.3 to 14.8), anxiety (15.7 excess cases per 1000; 95% CI, 11.8 to 19.6), and acute stress reaction and adjustment disorders (12.0 excess cases per 1000; 95% CI, 8.6 to 15.4). Deployment for more than 11 months was associated with 39.3 excess cases of depressive disorders (95% CI, 33.2 to 45.4), 23.5 excess cases of sleep disorders (95% CI, 19.4 to 27.6), 18.7 excess cases of anxiety (95% CI, 13.9 to 23.5), and 16.4 excess cases of acute stress reaction and adjustment disorders (95% CI, 12.2 to 20.6). CONCLUSIONS: Prolonged deployment was associated with more mental health diagnoses among U.S. Army wives, and these findings may have relevance for prevention and treatment efforts.

The overall aim of the current study was to comprehensively evaluate the prevalence, impact, and health correlates of marital aggression in a clinical sample of maritally discordant couples seeking psychological treatment. Participants were 93 consecutively presenting clinic couples and 16 maritally satisfied matched control couples from the community. Overall, 71% of clinic couples reported at least one act of marital aggression during the past year. Although 86% of the aggression reported was reciprocal between husbands and wives, impact and injuries sustained as a function of this aggression differed between husbands and wives. Specifically, wives were more likely than husbands to be negatively affected and to sustain severe injuries (eg, broken bones, broken teeth, or injury to sensory organs). Additionally, wives who experienced marital aggression reported clinical levels of depressive symptomatology. Recommendations are offered and risk markers are identified to improve detection by physicians of patients who may be involved in violent marriages.

Elderly wives caring for disabled husbands have special needs and problems. Through interviews it was discovered that morale scores of disabled husbands and their wives were associated; although morale was generally low, it was possible to dichotomize the wives into high and low morale groups. Wives with low morale scores were particularly in need of support if institutionalization of the husband was to be minimized. Isolation, loneliness, economic hardship and role overload were the most frequently mentioned problems of the low morale wife.

Wives' Employment and the Division of Family Work Basic Patterns of Family Work and Paid Work Paid Work, Sex, and Sex Role Ideology as Determinants of Family Work Wives' Desire for Greater Husband Participation in Family Work The Consequences of Role Overload Husbands' Psychological Involvement in Work and Family Husbands' and Wives' Roles The Issues Today

Demographic patterns of risk of lethal and nonlethal violence against wives in Canada were compared utilizing Statistics Canada's Homicide Survey (1974-1992) and Violence Against Women Survey (1993). Comparisons were based on 1,429 uxoricide victims and 8,385 interviewees of whom 277 had been assaulted by their husbands within the past 12 months. We anticipated that lethal and nonlethal violence would exhibit parallel patterns of risk in relation to demographic factors because male sexual proprietariness appears to be the dominant underlying issue in both lethal and nonlethal violence against wives. Some. but not all, demographic risk patterns were similar for lethal and nonlethal incidents. In particular: (1) Wives incurred much greater risk of both lethal and nonlethal violence in commonlaw unions than in registered unions; (2) In registered unions, the risks of lethal and nonlethal violence declined in similar fashion in relation to the wife's age, but in commonlaw unions, uxorcide risk increased until "middle-age", whereas the rates of nonlethal violence declined in much the same way as in registered unions; (3) Uxoricide rates increased sharply as the age disparity of marital partners increased, in both registered and commonlaw unions, but there was no apparent relationship between age disparity and rates of nonlethal violence.

This investigation places recent research about changes in wives' and husbands' domestic labor in the context of well-known reporting differences between different kinds of housework surveys. An analysis of the “reporting gap” between direct-question reports of housework hours from the National Survey of Families and Households (1988) and time-diary reports from Americans' Use of Time, 1985, shows that both husbands and wives overreport their housework contributions. Furthermore, gender attitudes, total housework, class, education, income, family size, and employment status together significantly affect the overreport, although the variables operate in different ways for wives and husbands. It is concluded that changing and uneven social perceptions of the appropriate domestic roles of women and men have resulted in reporting biases that do not necessarily correspond to actual changes in housework behavior. These findings cast doubt on claims that contemporary husbands are doing more housework than their predecessors.

Abstract This article focuses primarily on determining the economic consequences of family migration for husbands and wives in matched married-couple families, using data from waves 1 and 2 of the National Survey of Families and Households. The analysis is designed to determine whether or not the return to migration for husbands and wives is similarly affected by their relative earning potential, as predicted by the human-capital model of migration. The study's secondary contributions include its estimation of the effect of moving on earnings for both husbands and wives within matched married-couple families and its avoidance of the problems of self-selection bias and unobserved variable bias associated with cross-sectional models by using panel-data methods. The results indicate—as predicted by the gender-role model of family migration—that the effect of family migration on individual earnings is largely a function of gender: family migration causes an increase in the husband's income and no change in the wife's income even if a wife has a greater earning potential than her husband. Thus, the study does not support the human-capital argument—that family migration decisions are egalitarian and symmetrical, such that each spouse's absolute and relative earning power is given equal weight in the migration decision. This research makes a strong statement that the gender-role model of family migration is of greater utility for understanding family migration behavior than the human-capital model of family migration.

A sample of dual-employed couples is used to explore the causes of satisfaction with and arguments over the division of household labor. It is found that husbands are most satisfied with an equitable division of labor especially if their number of hours spent in household chores is not large. Wives by contrast seem to be most satisfied if the division of family work favors them. Wives satisfaction is not affected by the total number of hours spent in household chores but they are more content if their husbands share womens traditional chores. Husbands and wives do not agree about how often they argue over the division of labor. Men only perceive that arguments occur more frequently if they are dissatisfied with the current division. Women feel that arguments occur more frequently if they or their husbands are dissatisfied or if particular chores are shared. (authors)

The National Survey of Households and Families was used to test competing explanations of how the distribution of housework and paid work among couples affects depressive symptomatology. Considerations of equity predict that the fair distribution of labor across spouses will alleviate depression, while role theory predicts that the performance of multiple, engaging roles will inhibit depression, irrespective of equity across spouses. Results confirm that paid employment is associated with reduced depression among both husbands and wives until work hours exceed an upper threshold. However, time spent in housework is universally associated with increased depression, no matter what other role constellations exist. Little evidence supports the notion that equity in the division of labor (either paid or unpaid) inhibits depression, but perceptions of equity are significantly associated with lower levels of depression. In particular, husbands are strongly affected by perceived equity in the performance of paid work, while wives are strongly affected by perceived equity in the performance of housework.