College of Behavioral & Social Sciences

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The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations..

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    Future Chore Division Ideals and Expectations: Validating a Measure with Undergraduate Women
    (2018) Silberberg, Ayelet; O'Brien, Karen M; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    College-aged women expect to disrupt their future careers, earn less, and be responsible for more household and childcare chores than their future spouses. This unequal division of labor has been linked to inequality in the workforce between women and men with women earning less and being concentrated in low pay, low prestige occupations. The current investigation sought to improve understanding of this phenomenon by exploring the factor structure and psychometric properties of a measure of chore division ideals and expectations in a sample of undergraduate women. Exploratory factor analyses suggested separate measures of ideal and expected chores, each comprised of two factors: traditionally feminine chores, and traditionally masculine chores. Confirmatory factor analyses did not reach satisfactory cutoff levels, but the scores on the preliminary scales showed evidence for convergent validity, internal reliability, and test-retest reliability. Results also supported hypotheses regarding relationships between the subscales. Tentative implications of these findings, future directions for research, and clinical implications are discussed.
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    The Changing Nature of the Retirement Transition for Dual Earning Couples
    (2015) Jackson, Jonathan; Kahn, Joan R; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    My dissertation examines how dual-earning couples navigate the retirement transition differently now that women's and men's work lives have become more similar. As the retirement transition has become more complex, understanding how and when people retire requires researchers and policymakers to be attuned to the family lives in which individuals are embedded. The decision to retire is an individual choice but one's family circumstances, particularly one's spouse, can influence the process. Couples must often factor in spouses' age, health, pension assets, and health insurance coverage, especially since the work lives of many women have become much more similar to men. Whereas men's retirement decisions were seen to depend on their employment situation and women's' on their husband's, women's rising attachment to the labor force means their work lives should be increasingly important in understanding the retirement transition of couples. This dissertation fills a gap in retirement research by utilizing a life course perspective to systematically study change across cohorts in how marital partners manage the retirement transition amidst rapid structural changes in the economy. Analyses use multiple waves of data from the Health and Retirement Study, applying a variety of modeling techniques to investigate the way that couples move from employment to retirement. Specifically, I focus on retirement expectations and timing, looking at whether dual earning couples influence and synchronize each other's retirement and how this may change across cohorts. Results suggest that coordination between couples may be declining, as both husbands and wives influence their respective partners' retirement expectations less in later cohorts. Analysis of the degree to which dual-earning couples synchronize their retirement expectations show that such couples expect to retire together when they both have the pension resources to do so. Results from event history models further indicate that the retirement trajectories have changed for the leading baby boom cohort, as evidence implies they are delaying retirement longer than previous cohorts. The findings provide mixed support for the notion that wives are influencing their husbands' retirement timing more in later cohorts or that the influence of husbands on wives' retirement timing has declined across cohorts.