Preliminary research questions and given economical and sociological views on the distribution of household chores are as follows:
i) Is the distribution of household labour between partners different across countries and how does this distribution correlate with certain characteristics.
ii) To what extent is the outcome of the household labour distribution for different countries the result of preferences and/or bargaining power? This is discussed from the existing theoretical views both from economics and sociology (relative resource perspective, doing-gender perspective, the unitary model, the bargaining model and the collective model).
iii) How do the underlying assumptions of the existing different economic and sociological views hold, considering data for different countries?
ii) and iii) together give information on how different views are ‘performing’ for different countries and consequently what kind of preferences determine the observed household chores distribution. It might be, for example, that while the ‘doing gender’-view seems more appropriate for one country, ‘the relative resource’ –view is more appropriate for another country. When assumptions of a particular view seem to be more appropriate, this gives information about household behaviour and hence the preference/bargaining structure (an effort will be made to separate the bargaining and preference effects).
State of the art report:
Division of Domestic Labour (Altintas, E.) download
