Investigating the longitudinal interrelationship between housework time and market earnings: disentangling between-person from within-person effects

The work-to-family hypothesis and the family-to-work hypothesis provide alternate explanations for the housework-earnings relationship. This study examines these competing theoretical perspectives and explores the longitudinal, cross-lagged relationship between housework time and market earnings. The data consist of five waves (2004-2015) of an ongoing open cohort study with 1827 married Chinese adults living in urban China. The random intercept cross-lagged panel model, which can separate stable, between-person differences from within-person processes, was applied. Overall, this study found that the bidirectional housework-earnings relationship mainly occurred at the between-person level: higher market earnings were related to less housework time. Few relationship was observed at the within-person level: over the 12-year investigation period from 2004 to 2015, women's (but not men's) within-person fluctuations in market earnings influenced their housework time 2 years later only from 2004 to 2006. Overall, this study partially lends support to the work-to-family hypothesis but fails to show evidence for the family-to-work hypothesis.