The Stratified Impact of Everyday Unpredictability: A Daily Diary Study on Unexpected Events and Mothers’ and Father’s Wellbeing

Maaike Hornstra , Erasmus University Rotterdam
Renske Keizer, Erasmus University Rotterdam

How do unexpected events in everyday life affect parent wellbeing and do socioeconomic factors buffer or exacerbate these effects? While scholars increasingly recognize time as an unequally distributed resource across families, most evidence relates to absolute time (i.e., minutes and hours). This paper moves beyond “clock time” and shifts focus to people’s ability to manage and control time. We do so by studying the unequal consequences of unexpected events in everyday life: children become ill, the washing machine breaks down, or work demands abruptly increase, but not all families are able to manage these events to a similar extent. First, we hypothesize that the extent to which unexpected events trigger distress differs by SES. Various indicators are considered, as higher income may buffer negative effects, whereas demanding work schedules could exacerbate them. Second, we hypothesize that, due to gendered family roles and relative bargaining power, mothers are affected more negatively than fathers, especially in low-SES families. We test these ideas using a recently conducted daily diary study among 256 mothers and fathers from 128 Dutch families. Over 100 days, participants reported via their smartphone on the unexpected events they experienced that day in work, family, and health domains. Using these real-time repeated measures, we were able to perform multilevel modelling to test (1) within-person fluctuations in the wellbeing of mothers versus fathers as triggered by unexpected daily events (within-level) and (2) the proportion of variance being explained by socioeconomic differences (between-level).

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 Presented in Session P5. Health, Mortality, and Ageing 1