The ‘final say’ is not the last word. Gendered patterns, perceptions, and processes in household decision making among Chinese immigrant couples in Canada
Journal Title: Journal of Comparative Research in Anthropology and Sociology - Year 2010, Vol 1, Issue 1
Abstract
The central assumption of the ‘final-say’ measure of conjugal dynamics is that reported decision-making outcomes reveal gender inequality within the household; since power is defined as the ability to make decisions affecting the life of the family, the decider is often regarded as the one possessing more power or higher status. Qualitative data collected from in-depth interviews with 16 married Chinese immigrant couples in Canada, however, problematize this assumption. Drawing on data from separate interviews with the spouses, I highlight three subtle ways in which gender inequality manifests itself. First, in a substantial proportion of households, wives rather than husbands made decisions about day-to-day expenses, even when the wife held no paid employment or earned less than the husband. Second, husbands consciously avoided making such decisions. Not only did interviewees perceive household expenditure decisions as ‘women’s business’ (nurenjia de shi), but these decisions were also trivialized by both male and female respondents. Third, interview data showed that there was an unequal distribution of power between spouses, even in the model of joint decision making, because wives tended to seek their husbands’ approval, especially for real estate purchases or high-end consumption. The major findings from this study suggest that researchers’ conclusions about gender relations in the family may depend on the methods of data collection.
Authors and Affiliations
Shirley Sun Hsiao Li
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP129580
- DOI -
- Views 107
- Downloads 0
No crumb shall be left behind. Perceptions of food waste across generations
This paper aims to explore whether there are age-specific differences in perceptions about food waste in two groups of women living in Bucharest (born in/after 1989 vs mature in 1989), as well as the extent to which such...
Social closure and social policy The debates on social opening within benefit societies in the advent of national health insurance
Social solidarity is based on categories of belonging; trade unions rely on their members’ selfunderstanding as trade fellows and nation states on the ‘imagined’ (Anderson 2006 [1983]) common identity of their population...
“Just because they’re lies doesn’t mean they’re not true”: Learning and transmission of lies among storytellers
In diverse rural communities located near the borders separating Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay, traditional storytellers known as contadores de causos use lying as a strategy for their performances. Their legitimacy as s...
Bringing the doctor inside the care: the use of stories in doctor-patient communication
Narrative-Based Medicine is a recent important area of research and practice which aims to provide theoretical and empirical constructs for medical practice and doctor-patient communication. In health services, medical p...
The representation of older people playing a digital game in the short film ‘Pony Place’: A semiotic and narratological analysis
This article focuses on Dutch older adults’ use of digital devices in general, and digital games in particular, from an intergenerational perspective. We first present some facts related to provide insight into how Dutch...