Equalitarian marriages, spousal support, resourcefulness, and psychological distress among Israeli working women

Ninety-four married Israeli mothers of young children who had full-time outside employment participated in a study on the effect of work-family conflict on their level of distress. Based on Hobfoll's (1989) stress theory, "juggling" between work and family was expected to be stressful only if the women did not have the self-control skills (resourcefulness) to handle multiple roles or if they did not receive emotional and practical support from their spouses. The results revealed that women who had at least one resource (resourcefulness or spousal support) were less distressed than women who did not have either of these resources. Lack of spousal support was assumed to be stressful because it might have indicated to the women that they did not fulfill what is expected of them as "good mothers and wives." Hence it was predicted that spousal support would be associated with women's distress level only in nonequalitarian marriages that are based on traditional role expectations and not in equalitarian role-sharing marriages. The results were in line with these predictions. The study underlines the importance of individual differences in coping with family-work conflicts in terms of personality repertoires, spousal support, and type of marriage. (C) 1999 Academic Press.