Changes in employment and relationship satisfaction in times of the COVID-19 pandemic: Evidence from the German family Panel

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.

Automated summary

This study examined the impact of changes in partners' employment situation during the COVID-19 crisis on the relationship satisfaction of cohabiting couples. The research found that a significant proportion of respondents experienced either positive or negative changes in relationship satisfaction during the crisis, with relationship satisfaction decreasing for both men and women overall. While partners' employment situation did not significantly affect the negative association between respondents' employment and relationship satisfaction, the presence of children appeared to partly buffer against a COVID-19-related decrease.