| The present research aimed to examine demand-withdraw interaction in a stressed sample of job seeking couples, with a focus on the differences between female job seeker couples (i.e., female is experiencing the stress) and on male job seeker couples (i.e., the man is the stressed individual). It was predicted that women would protectively buffer their stressed partners by not demanding of them, similar to findings in the chronic illness literature. Men were not predicted to engage in protective buffering by withholding their demands. Male job seekers were also expected to have the most pronounced correlation between demand-withdraw and satisfaction, due to a greater sense of need deprivation for men than women when a job is lost. Self-report measures of satisfaction and demand-withdraw and observational measures of demand-withdraw were utilized with the 381 couples included in the study.; The results indicate that there is not a significant effect of job seeker gender on level of demand-withdraw. Rather, the level of female-demand/male-withdraw was higher than male-demand/female-withdraw for both female job seeker couples and male job seeker couples. However, this relationship was found to be dependent on whether the man or the woman went first in the interaction, which was not expected. When men go first, female demand-withdraw is higher than vice versa, but when women begin the discussion, the difference between the types of demand-withdraw become nonsignificant. In other words, when women go first, a spillover effect exists that equalizes the level of demanding and withdrawing between the genders for that second discussion, with men becoming more active in their demands and doing less withdrawing. The relationship between demand-withdraw and satisfaction was found to be more significant for job seekers than partners, across couple types. Female job seekers exhibited a demand-withdraw/satisfaction correlation similar to male job seekers. It appears that the status of being a job seeker versus a partner, as opposed to being male or female, involves a heightened level of susceptibility to one's own satisfaction when demand-withdraw is taking place. |
