A/S Sociology
Power and Decision making in marriage
Steven Edgell (1980) - Middle Class Couples
One approach to studying conjugal roles is to examine power within marriage. This has usually been attempted through an examination of who makes the decisions. Edgell interviewed both husbands and wives about who made the decisions, and also asked them which decisions they thought were most important.
Wives dominated in those areas of decision making concerning interior design, domestic spending and children’s clothes. All of these areas though were considered unimportant. Men dominated three areas of decision making – those relating to moving house, finance and the car – all of which were regarded as important.
What can you conclude from this study?
Dual Career Families
A more recent study by Irene Hardhill, Anne Green, Anna Dudlestone and David Owen (1997) attempted to discover whether there had been any shift towards more egalitarian power relationships in marriages since the work of Edgell. The researchers carried out semi structured interviews in dual career households around the Nottingham area. In all of the households, both partners had professional or managerial jobs. The sample therefore consisted of households where you might expect the careers of both partners to be important.
The households were classified into those where the husbands career took precedence in making household decisions (e.g. what part of the country to live in), where the wife’s career took precedence, and those where neither career clearly took precedence over the other.
The study concluded that although men still dominated the decision making in most households, there was a significant minority where this was not the case. There was therefore some evidence of a small move towards more egalitarian relationships.