The Great Recession and the Work-Parenting Balance in Italian Couples: A Time Use Study.

Annalisa Donno, University of Padova
Maria Letizia Tanturri , University of Padova

The Great Economic Recession, started in 2007, seems to have triggered an analogous Great Demographic Recession. The multiplicity of changes in employment, housing, wealth, fertility, living arrangements, psychological distress, and attitudes induced by the Great Recession (GR), are supposed to have had immediate impacts on the organization and patterns of family daily life. In Italy during the GR men’s unemployment rates have increased, while women’s unemployment level has remained almost stable, or even declined (as a consequence an increase in the proportion of female breadwinner households has been registered), and much remains to be known on the ways in which the economic downturn has shaped family lives. By using data from the Italian Time Use survey carried out in 2003-2004, 2008-09 and 2014-15 we’ll compare time use before, just before the beginning of the crisis, and few years later. We’ll specifically use Sequence Analysis techniques and focus on married couples with 0-14 years old co-resident children for understanding if the GR has changed the way they negotiate their time allocation between paid work and parenting responsibilities, and if in female breadwinner families or in those families where women are the main earner, a redefinition of the parenting responsibilities by gender occurred or not. As a second step we’ll use regression models for understanding if different typologies of work-childcare negotiation are associated to different levels of satisfaction with respect to the work-life daily balance. Our analyses will paint an encompassing picture of Italian gender-roles definition/re-definition for facing the economic crisis.

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 Presented in Session 97. Economic Precariousness and the Family