Role Strain Theory

Summary The article Couples' Work/Retirement Transitions, Gender, and Marital Quality explored the marital quality of both husbands and wives in adults from ages 50 to 72 who were currently working in their career jobs, recently retired, or remaining retired. The main purpose of this experiment was to determine “...whether the incidence or the sequence of spouses' retirement affects marital quality” (Moen, Kim, Hofmeister 2001). In this study retirement isn't viewed as a singular event, but rather a process that takes time to adjust to for both the husband and the wife. The researchers drew from the Homophily, Gender-Role Conformity, and Role Strain theses for a contextual way to measure marriage quality, while giving merit to the hypothesis

Homophily is the degree to which two partners are similar in the ways of beliefs, values, education, etc., along with Gender-Role Conformity which refers to the traditional gender roles men and women are expected to take in America of the man being the bread winner, and woman being home keeper, while the Role Strain thesis hypothesizes that “factors reducing strain and overload should be related to marital quality (Goode 1960). This experiment was carried out in two different waves, the first being in 1994-1995, and the second being two years later in 1996-1997. Within the subsample examined in the article there were 762 total individuals involved in this experiment, comprised of 534 married men and women who completed both of the two waves of the experiment who from six large companies, hospitals, and universities in upstate New york. The average age of the subsample was 60, with 95% of the respondents being white because of the demographic region the data was taken from. The “recently retired” category consisted of participants who had retired within the two year time span between the first and second waves of the

During the experiment the main issue was with the measures and sample used in the testing. The participants of the experiment all came from upstate New York, and were from 6 large companies, hospitals, and universities, which caused 95% of the population of the sample to be white. This is a large problem because there is no diversity to see if different people experience retirement different from either different ethnicities, demographics, or geographic regions. This could easily be remedied by adding more diverse demographics to the subject field. In addition to the 95% white population, the study on looks at only heterosexual couples because this study was inspecting traditional roles, however this may be a missed opportunity to find out some very interesting statistics about homosexual couples, which have been studied much less than their heterosexual counterparts. Another issue with the experiment was how the experimenters measured marital quality. This quality was measured by two qualities, one being marital satisfaction, the other being frequency of marital conflict. To determine these two qualities the researchers asked only two questions with a scale of one to five (five being the most satisfied/more than once a week, 1 being lowest satisfaction/never, respectively). The rating of marital quality would most likely be more accurate if the experimenters had more