Consequences of occupational demands for dual-career partnerships

It has almost become a commonplace that increasing temporal, physical and psychological work demands and pressures have challenged capabilities for maintaining strong intimate relationships and families. In our article we compare how work-to-family conflicts, serious confl icts within partnerships, and the risk of separation are infl uenced by antecedents located in two dominant research traditions: on the one hand individual work strains, and on the other research on balancing work and family, taking account of different patterns of employment and housework within partnerships. For our analyses we draw on two different data sets: the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) and the study entitled ‘Employment relationships a social exchange’. The results reveal the different negative infl uences of high work strains on both the quality and the stability of partnerships.