Women''s Family Status in Taiwan: A Dyadic Analysis with the Weighted Composite of Marital Power
Date Issued
2008
Date
2008
Author(s)
Chien, Wen-Yin
Abstract
Using 516 couple data gathered from The Economic Development and Women’s Family Status in Taiwan conducted in 1995-1996, this dissertation aims to provide a better measurement of marital power and use multilevel model to correctly analyze dyadic couple data. The main findings include the following: . Marital Power with Weighted Compositehe analysis of the family decision-making patterns and the division of household labor in Taiwan points to the necessity to develop a multidimensional women’s family status index. If the researcher fails to give a comprehensive consideration to the marital power relationship, significant bias will arise from the different selection of study subjects or indicators. n 2007, scholars related to family and gender studies have invited to participate in the study of Developing Weight Schemes for Marital Power Measurement in Three Chinese Societies. Applying the technique of Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), three levels of weights were calculated and transformed. he results show that the study of family decision-making power is of absolute importance to observe women’s family status in Taiwan. mong the five types of decisions, the most revealing decision item that reflects women’s power is that whether they can say no to family norms（weight equal to 0.290）, followed by whether women can take part in the decision-making of major economic issues of the family (0.250), occupation related issues (0.243), child related issues (0.170) and daily expense management (0.047). s to household labor items, husband’s involvement in shopping for commodity and making small repairs around the house is of limited value to judge the conjugal marital power; in contrast, women''s status in a society can be inferred by looking at husband‘s involvement in activities that are time- and labor-consuming, such as preparing the meal and doing household cleaning. Final weights are calculated by multiplying each indicator’s weight at three levels. y assigning different weight and score to each of the indicators, an integrated marital power score in representing women’s family status can be developed. The result shows that Taiwan is still a patriarchic society , among the 516 families, about 3/4 are patriarchic, 20% are even powered, and only 2% are matriarchic. This finding is different from the past studies in which only limited indicators were considered. . The Analysis of Dyadic Couple Data esults show that various degrees of discrepancy exist among couples'' answers on household division of labor in various family stages, and the family decision items. After converting the indicators into women’s family status scores, more than 30% of the answers from husbands and wives are inconsistent, showing that it is indeed necessary to use “dyad” as the unit for analysis instead of “individual” ultilevel modeling, also commonly referred to as hierarchical liner modeling, is a relatively new statistical technique that is particularly useful for the analysis of dyadic data. Using 516 couple data, the APIM multilevel model developed by David A. Kenny was utilized to analyze women’s family status in Taiwan indings regarding the mechanisms that influence women’s family status show that husband’s family status is given and protected by traditional patriarchic norms, the three factors that prevent the development of even-powered marital relationships are living arrangement, Hakka culture, and being encouraged to have children. ersonal resources are crucial for a woman to break free from traditional norm and her husband’s superior status. With regard to the factors to account for the higher women’s family status, it was demonstrated by both husband’s and wife’s answers that women’s better education, women’s modern sex-role attitudes (cognitive resource), and women’s relative income (financial resource) are significant. The critical role of the influence of the husband’s sex-role attitudes and findings from 17 couples’in-depth interviews are also discussed. he dissertation concludes that efforts ought to be made to include conjugal unit, instead of one spouse, in the study of marital interaction in Taiwan. Recommendations for future studies have also been proposed.
Subjects
Marital power
Dyadic Data Analysis
Multilevel Modeling
SDGs
Type
thesis
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