Gender Ideologies, Marital Roles, and Marital Quality in Taiwan

This study uses the multidimensional measures included in the 1996 Taiwan Social Change Survey to examine the effects of gender ideologies and marital role sharing on marital quality among married Taiwanese men and women as reporting spouses. The authors’ quantitative analyses indicate that (a) there is little direct relationship between gender ideologies and marital quality in this Taiwanese sample for both genders,(b) egalitarian marital power is directly and positively related to marital harmony and negatively related to marital discord, (c) the nontraditional division of domestic labor is directly and positively related to marital quality primarily through the enhancement of marital harmony, and (d) the proposed conceptual model does not vary substantially across the two genders. The authors suggest that these findings should be further validated by utilizing couples as the units of analysis.