Another study, this one by Martin and Roberts, was carried out in 1984. It backed up the findings of Anne Oakley, which was done ten years earlier. This study was, however, done on a much larger scale, with 6,000 women aged between sixteen to fifty-nine. This study found out that men would be more likely to take an active role in the running of a household if the wife had a paid job. I intend to look at the paid jobs of the males and females I survey as I think many more females will be in paid work now than in 1984.
In 1980 Hunt carried out a study which found husbands of both waged and unwaged wives only helped on a spasmodic basis, which gives women a double shift. His study also found that men were more likely to take an active role if the wife had a paid job. I shall be looking at this hypothesis in my study as I think that most of the females that I question will have paid jobs, as it is the norm in today’s society.
Fiona Devine carried out the more recent study I am going to include in my study and it was carried out in 1992. It looked at car workers in Luton. More women worked part time resulting in greater involvement by men in childcare, and to a lesser extent housework. This was however, as a result of necessity rather than desire. Conjugal roles were still for the most part segregated between males and females.
My hypotheses suggest that male participation in the household is increasing from previous generations. The previous studies already suggest that the male participation has increased since 1957. It will be interesting to see if my study indicates whether or not this has been the trend more recently.
The Methodology
I have decided to take a Structural Functionalist approach to the subject. I made this decision based on how the causal laws can be applied to conjugal roles. I will have to find out the causes and I will do this with a questionnaire. The causes could be one of several things, such as education, social class, ethnic background, their occupation, the rise in feminism or perhaps their consciousness. I will also have to show the changes. I can do this by looking at previous studies, as I mentioned in the context.
The type of sample I am going to do is opportunity; this is because it is the most practical and easy way for me to go about the study and I will not have the time or the money to carry out a larger study which would require a more structured sample type. The advantages of using this type of study are that it is quick, easy and cheap as previously mentioned, but a criticism of this type of study is that it may not be representative. Along with this type of study I am going to use some official statistics and previous studies. The scientific use of official statistics are used to develop causal laws, which I am going to try and create on Conjugal roles. I chose to take the functionalist approach for the following reasons:-
- It is quick
- It is cheap
- It is easy
- It suits this type of study ethically and morally
- It allows the use of previous studies and official statistics
- It can create a questionnaire which will give me quantitative data which will be easier and quicker to analyse.
- Quantitative data will allow me to create Causal Laws
A methold which I was going to use was time budget studies. These generally involve asking respondents to record their activities for a specified time interval over a number of days, or have them keep diaries registering the number and nature of tasks performed. The findings are generally remarkably consistent but it would have given me qualitative data, which I could not draw causal laws from, and it would have taken a lot longer to analyse. I may have also had to change my theoretical perspective to do this type of study.
The Structural Functionalist view of the conjugal relationship is that of a well-balanced couple, each person has a specific set of mutually agreed and integrated tasks to perform. There are several reasons for the divisions of labour, usually a combination of gender, class and occupation, all of which combine to determine the couples activity. There is normally a clear division between the jobs of the home and family and the jobs of work, normally headed by the male who then assumes the position of breadwinner, and the female who becomes in-charge of the housework. However, since about the 1950’s this traditional account of the division of conjugal roles has come under a lot of criticism for several reasons. The starting point for the criticism on the changing roles is Elizabeth Bott’s work, “Family and Social Networks”. Bott distinguishes between two types of conjugal roles, segregated and joint. She studied 128 working class and middle class couples and found that they both had segregated conjugal roles. In the segregated case, men and women have a clear differentiation of tasks, and a huge number of separate interests and activities. In the joint relationship many tasks are carried out together with little task difference and separation of interests. Bott noted that in all families there was basic division of labour in which the man was primarily responsible for supporting the family financially, and the woman was primarily responsible for housework and childcare. In my study I am going to try and find out if today, nearly 50 years later, conjugal roles have changed from segregated to joint.
The pilot study I carried out was mainly successful. However, it did highlight several flaws in my investigations; these included a lack of understanding of some of the sociological terms such as, “segregated” and “joined”. I shall change it slightly and highlight my changes in the conclusion.
Evidence
Six couples participated in my questionnaire and were asked a range of questions which were relevant to finding information about the subjects mentioned in my method section. The questionnaire is divided into three sections. Firstly there is the main body which is where I ask both partners questions while they are together. There is a section which is specific for either the male or the female. During the time that the participants answer the questions on these sheets they have no contact with each other. In this way we avoid the control effect which could affect the validity of the study.
?? third section
The first question I asked was “what is your occupation”? This was not really relevant to the survey but it gave me an idea of the participants class, which may be useful later in the survey. I then asked the participants about who the main breadwinner was in the family. I had expected the male to be the main bread winner in each case. However, in one case the female was the main breadwinner. I found this surprising.
The next question I asked was about the number of children they had. I asked this because I wanted to get a clear idea of the type of family I was studying. Everybody in the survey had at least one child. I then asked “are the tasks carried out in your house joined or segregated”? This would give me a clear idea of whether the conjugal roles in the family were changing from segregated to joined. Anne Oakley stated that they were firmly segregated in the 1950’s
The sample showed that of the six couples who answered questions in my questionnaire, four said they had segregated roles in their household while two said they had joined roles. In 1950 when Oakley did a similar research there was nothing like two thirds of the survery ???? what does this sentence mean Chris
This could be a piece of evidence to suggest that conjugal roles are changing and are in fact becoming more joined as opposed to the studies taken in the past which show that almost all household roles were separated. This question alone could not prove my suspicion and therefore I asked another question around the same subject.
The next sets of questions were answered only by the males to avoid the control effect their partners could potentially have on their partners.
Firsly there was a large table that listed the tasks most commonly undertaken by couples in a household. The list was ticked as appropriate by the males, which showed what they participated in. A copy of an identical list was then given to the female which she filled in whilst separated from her partner, again to avoid the control effect. The results are shown in the table below and highlight some conflict between the answers given by each partner.
In some cases both partners said they did the same task. I must use this information carefully because in some of the cases one of the partners may be lying and this would affect the validity of my study. The answers I got from the different couples I interviewed varied widely, making it difficult to draw any conclusions.
Below this table I took the opportunity to ask the respondents a question about
?? above sentence
themselves in the males case and their partners in the females case. This was because I thought it was important to find each others opinions while there would be no control effect from their partners. I decided to ask the males the following question “do you feel that you participate enough to the running of your household”? Two-thirds of them replied “yes”, suggesting that the males are in general satisfied with the shared workload between them and their partner.
I then asked the females “does your partner think that when they do help with the domestic tasks, they are doing you a favor”? Five out of six replied “yes” and the other one replied “sometimes”. This suggests to me that there is some conflict between the sexes as to what is a suitable amount of work for each of them.
Evaluation
The study I have carried out shows that as I thought, conjugal roles are changing. It was thought by many sociologists who carried out larger scale studies before mine, that females did the majority of the housework. Along with this it was also thought that the amount of work done in the house by males was increasing, especially in childcare as Fiona Devine found out in her study.
I noticed in my study that all of the males in the study took an active role in both housework and childcare. Also, perhaps more surprising, is that out of everybody I studied, they all had paid jobs. This means, as Anne Oakley suggested, that the sample would all have double shifts. Oakley suggested that it would be just the females who would have a double shift as they did almost all of the housework at that point in time. My research however suggests otherwise. All of the females in my sample had a paid job, forcing the males to take a more active role in housework.
Also every couple I questioned in this survey had children, so the men were therefore forced to take a more active role in their upbringing. When the males were asked “do you feel that you participate enough in the running of your household”? two thirds of them replied “yes”. This suggested that the males are in general satisfied with the shared workload between them and their partners. However, when the females were asked “does your partner think that when they do help with the domestic tasks that they are doing you a favor”? five out of six replied “yes”. The other one replied “sometimes”. This suggests to me that there is some conflict between the sexes as to what is a suitable amount of work for each of them. As for the change from segregated to conjugal roles, it seems that they have not changed that much since Anne Oakley’s study in 1974. The responses I got showed that two thirds of my respondents still felt they had segregated conjugal roles and only two of the six couples felt they had joined conjugal roles.
Over all I can see that there has been a consistent change in conjugal roles since the 1950’s. This change has resulted from a change in society, the family and the way the family functions in society.
The new opportunities available to women have enabled the family to increase in its diversity. These changes were inevitable, as women would not put up with looking after the house while the male goes out to be the breadwinner. The traditionalists view of the “cereal packet family” is becoming a feature of the past and the new type of family with some joined roles in housework and childcare and shared interests between both males and females are revolutionising the family. There has been a steady change over the last fifty years that has seen the males take a more active position in carrying out conjugal roles and it likely this change will continue for coming generations.
