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This paper compares the gender division of household labor in the United States and Japan to test if economic exchange and gender ideology theories operate equivalently in both contexts. Both nations have undergone similar trends of industrialization, urbanization, and other modernization forces, yet each country retains a unique cultural history with respect to the division of household labor. Previous work argues that the traditional gender division of work is more strongly enforced and encouraged through gender ideology in Japan than in the U.S. Using structural equations modeling, separate dimensions of gender ideology are modeled as latent variables, gender ideology is included explicitly as a mediating rather than an exogenous variable, and formal testing for equivalence of the models between the U.S. and Japan is possible. In Japan, going against the traditional beliefs that women really want a home and children and that a man's job is to earn money has the greatest impact on housework. In the U.S., relative income between the wife and husband is the biggest predictor of the division of household labor, but this factor is not significant in Japan. Women's work in the U.S. affects housework both directly and indirectly through beliefs about whether working hurts a woman's family relationships. The effect of gender ideology and work experience on the division of household labor are independent of each other in Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This project compares the United States and Japan to test whether modern trends in family and work life have produced similar conceptions of gender ideology in both countries, or whether different cultural understandings of the same gender ideology questions remain. Differences in measurement between the two cultures must be taken into account before an accurate comparison of gender ideology in the U.S. and Japan is possible. This study uses eight items from the 2002 International Social Survey Program module "Family and Changing Gender Roles III" to test the measurement equivalence of gender ideology in the U.S. and Japan. Confirmatory factor analyses provide evidence of distinct underlying structures of gender ideology in the U.S. and Japan based on different ideas about the role of the housewife and personal fulfillment. However, a high level of measurement equivalence is found for the majority of gender ideology measures. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sharing a home with a partner before marriage is an important life transition for an increasing number of young adults in the U.S. Cohabitation serves as an alternative to the more formal bonds of marriage, but cohabitation can also provide a test of compatibility and stability for couples that will later marry. Much research has focused on who cohabits, but many questions remain about the transition out of cohabitation: Who is likely to marry a cohabiting partner? Which couples are at greater risk of separation? Are different types of couples more likely to maintain cohabiting relationships as a substitute for marriage? Previous studies have almost exclusively used the National Survey of Families and Households to investigate these questions. This presentation takes advantage of the more recent, more racially diverse sample from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, and uses event history analysis techniques to examine the competing risks of marriage and separation among varying groups of cohabiters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]