Browsing by Subject "Intimate relationships"
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Item Health work in long-term gay, lesbian, and straight couples(2011-05) Reczek, Corinne Elizabeth; Umberson, Debra; Williams, Christine; Gilbert, Dorie; Raley, R. Kelly; Gonzalez-Lopez, GloriaCompared to men, women devote substantially more attention and effort toward enhancing the health of their spouses. Yet, scholars have been unable to explain why this gender gap persists. Women also do more unpaid work in the home than men, and a significant literature explains the origins of this gender gap. In order to better understand why women do more to enhance the health of their spouse, this dissertation maps well-tested theory on unpaid work in the home on the literature on social integration and health to develop the theoretical construct of health work. Health work is defined as the activities and dialogue concerned with enhancing others’ health habits. After developing this theoretical construct, this dissertation turns to a qualitative examination of health work dynamics in 61 straight, gay, and lesbian couples living in the United States (N = 122). Findings reveal two distinct ways that partners work to shape one another’s health habits. Respondents in all couple types describe specialized health work, whereby one partner does health work over the course of the relationship. In straight couples, women perform the bulk of health work and men were the primary recipients of health work. Individuals rely on gendered discourses of difference to explain these unequal health work dynamics. Cooperative health work, whereby both partners perform health work in mutually reinforcing ways, emerges nearly exclusively in gay and lesbian couples. Individuals rely on discourses of similarity to explain why they perform cooperative health work. Findings reveal that health work processes not only depend on gender, but also on the intersection of gender, sexuality, and the gender composition of a couple. Additionally, this dissertation finds that partners not only do health work to promote one another’s healthy habits, but that partners also attempt to promote one another’s unhealthy habits. The implications for the promotion of both healthy and unhealthy habits are discussed.Item Social ties and physical activity patterns over the life course : gender, race, and age variations(2014-05) Lodge, Amy Caroline; Umberson, Debra; Angel, Jacqueline; Crosnoe, Robert; Gonzalez-Lopez, Gloria; Hayward, MarkIn this dissertation I explore the lived experiences and meanings underlying population patterns linking social ties and exercise. To do so, I frame an analysis of qualitative data from 60 in-depth interviews with 15 white women, 15 black women, 15 white men, and 15 black men with life course theory and critical perspectives on gender, race, and age. In Article 1, I examine how parental influence matters for individuals’ exercise trajectories (i.e., lived experiences of change or stability in exercise patterns) from childhood into adulthood, how adult life course transitions (e.g., parenthood) and turning points (e.g., injury) matter in relation to this influence for exercise trajectories, and how they matter differently at the intersection of race and gender. I develop the concepts of disrupted advantage and disadvantage to refer to my key finding that adult life experiences can disrupt processes of cumulative (dis)advantage around exercise in ways that differ at the intersection of race and gender. In Article 2, I examine the gendered processes through which intimate relationship formation and dissolution result in shifts in exercise habits and find that relationship formation shapes men’s and women’s exercise habits in distinctive ways. Further, these gendered processes are shaped by men’s and women’s relational gendered performances, which reveal the importance of a gender-as-relational perspective for understanding the links between relationship formation and gendered changes in exercise habits. Finally, in Article 3 I examine how body image, as socially constituted, shapes individuals’ motivation to exercise in ways that differ by gender, age, and race. I further examine how, through exercise intentions and practices, individuals craft meanings about the body, gender, race, and age.