ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic had major implications for private and family lives. The German Family Panel pairfam conducted an online survey regarding the experiences during the pandemic. The survey was conducted from May to July 2020. It includes instruments introduced in previous pairfam waves as well as new modules on topics that proved particularly relevant during the COVID-19 pandemic. The resulting dataset encompasses a sample of 3,182 respondents from all German federal states ranging in age from 17-47 years. The data has already been used in a variety of scientific publications and is available for research and teaching purposes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)
ABSTRACT
Families have been hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic and its associated lockdown, but barely any research has been conducted yet, investigating how COVID-19-related stressors - and, specifically, disruptions in established employment arrangements - affected couples' relationship quality. To account more comprehensively for such non-monetary costs of the COVID-19 pandemic, the present study investigates whether changes in partners' employment situation during the COVID-19 crisis - particularly home-office and short-time work - had an immediate impact on the relationship satisfaction of cohabiting married and unmarried couples. To do so, we estimated fixed-effects regression models, exploiting unique data from the German Family Panel (pairfam;wave 11) and its supplementary COVID-19 web-survey. We observed a substantial proportion of respondents experiencing positive (20%) or negative (40%) changes in relationship satisfaction during the crisis. Relationship satisfaction has decreased, on average, for men and women alike, almost irrespective of whether they experienced COVID-19-related changes in their employment situation. While partners' employment situation hardly moderated the negative association between respondents' employment and relationship satisfaction, the presence of children seemed to buffer partly against a COVID-19-related decrease. Our results thus confirm previous findings suggesting that the COVID-19 pandemic constitutes a threat to couples' relationship quality and healthy family functioning more generally.