The Effects Of The Resource Bases Of The Marital Power On The Financial Support For The Wife’s Native Parents And The Urban-rural Differences

The phenomenon "guniangjia"(the married daughter supporting her native parents) is more and more common and attracts more attention of family sociologists recently. According to the mainstream explanation, that results from that the wife’s marital power is increasing and even exceeds the husband’s sometimes. However, the explanation is just mentioned in the discussion of some studies or received from qualitative studies. Thus with the data collected in Shanghai, Zhejiang and Fujian in2004from the PSFD (Panel Study of Family Dynamics) the study tries to apply the quantitative method to discuss and test the above hypothesis. The study uses the married couple as the unit of analysis and "guniangjia" can be viewed as "guqijia"(the wife supporting her native parents) since "guqijia" should result from the couple’s joint decision. The study is focused on the financial support to the elderly and operates "guqijia" into two dependent variables:whether or not the financial support preference between the husband’s parents and the wife’s parents is untraditional (the traditional preference is that the husbands’ parents get more support) and whether or not the couple gives the financial support to the wife’s parents. According to the marital power theory, the study is focused on the effects of the resource bases of the marital power and namely operates the marital power with the resource theory. According to the theory that the marital power is based on the resources that the husband and the wife owns (including their respective native parents’ resources), the independent variables are the absolute and relative values of education, SEI and income of the husband, the wife and their own parents and the management power of the family pool, which closely relates to the support decision. The basic hypothesis of the study is that the more resources the wife owns, the more marital power she has and then the more possibly "guqijia" occurs. The study gets the information of the whole family including the couple and their own native parents from one respondent of the couple and uses the binary logistic regression to analyze the data. Considering the "Urban and Rural Dual Structure" of China, the close relation between the elder-supporting issue and the traditionalism of the community, and the different extent of the effect of the resource-power theory between developed and developing areas, the study separately runs the regression analysis in the urban and rural samples. Three main discoveries are as follows. First, the effects of part of relative marital resource-power variables are mainly significant in the urban sample. In the urban community, the financial support preference is classified as the daily family decision while whether to support the wife’s parents is classified as the key family decision. The relative marital resources (e.g. the relative value of education) affect the basic marital power structure and the effect of the structure is mainly on the key family decision while the specific management power of the family pool has more effect on the daily family decision. Second, the explanation strength of viewing the parents’resources as the martial extended resources is limited. The parents’ resources should be viewed as the index of the need for the financial support from the couple and the capability of offering resources to the couple (not the marital individuals). Third, there are some differences in the effects of the independent variables between in the urban sample and in the rural sample. Compared with the rural sample, more resource-power variables have significant effects in the urban sample. In the rural sample, the cultural norms have more effect and it is more reasonable to explain the effects of some variables with the cultural norms.