Determinants and impact of role-related time use allocation on self-reported health among married men and women: a cross
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RESEARCH ARTICLE
Open Access
Determinants and impact of role-related time use allocation on self-reported health among married men and women: a crossnational comparative study Kenisha Russell Jonsson1,2, Gustav Oberg1, Florence Samkange-Zeeb3 and Nicholas Kofi Adjei1,3,4*
Abstract Background: Research on the effects of marriage on health maintains that there is a gender-specific gradient, with men deriving far greater benefits than women. One reason provided for this difference is the disproportionate amount of time spent by women on housework and childcare. However, this hypothesis has yet to be explicitly tested for these role-related time use activities. This study provides empirical evidence on the association between role-related time use activities (i.e. housework, childcare and paid work) and self-reported health among married men and women. Methods: Data from the Multinational Time Use Study (MTUS) on 32,881 men and 26,915 women from Germany, Italy, Spain, the UK and the US were analyzed. Seemingly unrelated regression (SUR) models and multivariable logistic regression were used to estimate the association between role-related time use activities and self-reported health among married men and women. Results: The findings showed that education, occupation and number of children under 18 years old in the household were the most consistent predictors of time allocation among married men and women. Significant gender differences were also found in time allocation, with women sacrificing paid working time or reducing time devoted to housework for childcare. Men, in contrast, were less likely to reduce paid working hours to increase time spent on childcare, but instead reduced time allocation to housework. Allocating more time to paid work and childcare was associated with good health, whereas time spent on housework was associated with poor health, especially among women. Conclusions: Time allocation to role-related activities have differential associations on health, and the effects vary by gender and across countries. To reduce the gender health gap among married men and women, public policies need to take social and gender roles into account. Keywords: Marriage, Self-reported health, Gender, Cross-national, Multinational time use study, Institutional settings, Role-related activities, Time allocation
* Correspondence: [email protected] 1 The Institute for Future Studies, Stockholm, Sweden 3 Department of Prevention and Evaluation, Leibniz Institute for Prevention Research and Epidemiology – BIPS, Unit Social Epidemiology, Achterstrasse 30, 28359 Bremen, Germany Full list of author information is available at the end of the article © The Author(s). 2020 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were mad
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