Marital adjustment and sex-role egalitarianism as each relates to job involvement, career commitment, and work involvement of wives of dual-career couples

The study's purpose was to ascertain whether, in dual-career couples, a wife's marital adjustment and her husband's sex-role egalitarianism (relative to the wife's sex-role egalitarianism) were each related to the wife's job involvement, career commitment, and work involvement. A further purpose of the study was to ascertain which independent variable--wife's marital adjustment or husband's sex-role egalitarianism (relative to his wife's)--accounted for the greater amount of variance in each of the dependent variables--wife's job involvement, career commitment, and work involvement. Fifty-one dual-career couples, located by networking and snowball sampling, completed paper-pencil instruments to assess all independent and dependent variables. Nine hypotheses were tested. Pearson product-moment correlations found no relationship between wife's marital adjustment and husband's egalitarianism and any of the work-related commitments/involvements. Although multiple regressions showed that marital adjustment accounted for more variance in job involvement and career commitment, and husband's egalitarianism accounted for more variance in work involvement, neither independent variable accounted for the variance in work-related commitments/involvements to any great extent. It was concluded that the study wives did not allow either the state of their marriages or their husband's sex-role attitudes to influence their attitudes about their jobs, careers, or work-in-general--which supports the separate spheres model, rather than the spillover model, of the relationship between family and work for these variables. Finally, study implications and recommendations for future research were also presented.