Understanding Housework: A Multi-Level Approach

This dissertation analyses housework in a cross-national perspective.

Specifically, I use multi-level data to test the relationship between country-level characteristics and individual-level divisions of and decisions about housework.

To assess multi-level relationships, this dissertation pairs individual-level data from the 2004 European Social Survey with country-level data from various sources including the 2004 United Nations Development Report and the 2004 United Nations Demographic Yearbook.

This dissertation addresses three specific empirical questions regarding housework including: (1) the relationship between country-level gender egalitarianism and rates of full-time female labor force participation and individual-level housework conflict; (2) the relationship between the aggregated and disaggregated gender egalitarianism measures and divisions of household labor; and (3) the relationship between country-level divorce culture, and individual-level housework conflict.

The results demonstrate the importance of understanding individual-level housework in a multi-level cross-national perspective.