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.