Making commitments, creating lives: Linking women's roles and adult development.

Abstract

This study examined the personality and well-being implications of different patterns of commitments to work, family, and leisure in a longitudinal study of women who graduated from college in 1964. Analyses revealed that women's work and family commitments were not mutually exclusive, or even systematically related: women in this sample combined different kinds of work and family commitments in a variety of ways. There were very few differences in standard measures of subjective well-being (including physical symptoms, health, energy, anxiety, depression, mood states, and happiness) according to women's commitment patterns, suggesting that women can arrive at a sense of well-being in adulthood through a wide variety of life paths and experiences. However, women's work and family role commitment patterns were related to both observer and self-report of different personality characteristics as measured by the Q-sort (Block, 1961) and the CPI (Gough, 1987), respectively. Women's work commitment patterns were related to instrumentality (i.e., assertiveness, independence) and interpersonal responsiveness (i.e., warmth, nurturance), while their family role commitment patterns were related to normative value orientation (i.e., positive feelings about socially normative rules and values). The results provide support for assertions that role involvements are consequential for adult personality (e.g. Erikson, 1968; Stryker, 1981; Caspi, 1987), and indicate that there is important information to be gained through examinations of differences in the nature of women's commitments to work and family (rather than assuming that these commitments are qualitatively similar for all women, or that they are both mutually exclusive and inherently conflictual). The single most important conclusion to be drawn from this work is that examining the diversity and variations among women, particularly in terms of the major structures and commitments in their adult lives, is centrally important to furthering and improving our understanding of women's adult development.