COVID-19 and Relationship Quality. Emotional, Working and Organizational Spheres

This study contributes to the growing literature on the repercussions of the COVID-19 pandemic on family functioning, with an especial focus on couples’ relationship quality. We advance an analytical model that emphasizes the role of three main stressors of relationship quality during the pandemic, namely emotional, paid work-related, and organizational. To outline such an approach, we analyze whether the pandemic—and its consequent home confinement—has reduced relationship quality in Italy, Spain, and France using data collected in April 2020. We show that relationship quality decreases for a non-negligible part of the population, and that this result is driven mostly by the emotional stressor. These negative consequences on relationship quality appear relatively stable across gender, different support networks, and countries, suggesting that the severity of the lockdown measures outweighed traditional moderation factors usually accounted for in family research.