Women’s Psychological Stress during the COVID-19 Pandemic in Japan with a Focus on Gender-role Attitudes and Relationship Quality

Emiko Katsurada^1, and Mami Muto²

¹Department of Psychology, Kwansei Gakuin University, Nishinomiya, Japan

²Department of International Communication, Hannan University, Matsubara, Japan

Cite this paper:
Emiko Katsurada and Mami Muto. Women’s Psychological Stress during the COVID-19 Pandemic in Japan with a Focus on Gender-role Attitudes and Relationship Quality. Research in Psychology and Behavioral Sciences. 2022; 10(1):18-23. doi: 10.12691/rpbs-10-1-3

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought us many changes in our lives, which placed much more stress on us. Previous studies on the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic from all over the world indicated gender gap, that is, women more than men were negatively influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, we focused on women and investigated the association among their stress level, gender-role attitudes, relationship quality, and experience of teleworking during the COVID-19 pandemic. We conducted an online survey. The participants were 547 Japanese women who lived with their spouse or partner during the COVID-19 pandemic. The average age was 40.03 (SD = 10.81) years old with the number of participants were equally distributed from 20s to 50s. The results of multiple regression analyses indicated that women who had egalitarian gender-role attitudes and/or higher quality of relationship with their spouse or partner had lower level of stress during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the change in relationship quality from before the pandemic and the experience of telework did not related to their stress level. Implications and limitations of this study were discussed.

Keywords:
COVID-19 pandemic women’s stress gender-role attitudes relationship quality

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