Marriage: Cleaning More Important Than Children

9 August 2007

For immediate release

Sharing The Vacuuming Or Cleaning More Important Than Children As A Key To A Successful Marriage

New Zealanders rate sharing household chores as more important than children or having shared tastes and interests for making a successful marriage.

This finding from UMR Research’s latest survey of New Zealander’s attitudes and opinions is very similar in this respect to the views of Americans in research conducted by the PEW Research Centre earlier this year.

“We found sharing the household chores was almost as important as having a happy sexual relationship and ranked third in a list of nine attributes associated with successful marriages,’ said UMR Director Tim Grafton.

“PEW quoted the doggerel ‘I like hugs. I like Kisses. But what I really like is help with the dishes’ when it reported its findings. It seems Kiwis could echo the same as the Americans as in both surveys 62% rated ‘sharing household chores’ as very important for making a successful marriage,” Mr. Grafton said.

“Interestingly, a survey of Americans in 1990 found then that only 47% of Americans rated sharing the household chores as important. It seems that over the past 17 years there has been an increasing appreciation of the value in the equality of unpaid work at home,” he said.

The top ranked attribute was ‘faithfulness’ which 92% said was very important. This was well ahead of ‘happy sexual relationship’ which 67% rated as very important and ‘sharing household chores’ (62%).

Children ranked as the sixth most important attribute with 46% rating them as very important. This was below ‘good housing’ and ‘adequate income’ which were rated as very important by 55% and 48% respectively, but above ‘shared tastes and interests’ which was rated very important by 40%.

The most significant differences between Kiwis and Americans were on the attributes of “shared religious beliefs” and “agreement on politics”. Only 21% of Kiwis rated shared religious beliefs as important compared to 49% of Americans, and only 4% rated agreement on politics as very important compared to 12% of Americans.

UMR’s research was based on a randomly stratified sample of 750 adults aged 18 years and over and was conducted between 2-6 August 2007. The PEW Research Centre’s survey was also a telephone survey of adults aged 18 years and above and was conducted in May 2007. The question asked in both surveys was the same and the table below compares responses between UMR and PEW for those who rated each attribute “very important”.

SEE:

MAKING A MARRIAGE WORK - COMPARISON

Here is a list of things which some people think make for a successful marriage. Please tell me, for each one, whether you think it is very important, rather important, or not very important?

VERY IMPORTANT
UMR1
% PEW2
%
Faithfulness 92 93
Happy sexual relationship 67 70
Sharing household chores 62 62
Good housing 55 51
Adequate income 48 53
Children 46 41
Shared tastes and interests 40 46
Shared religious beliefs 21 49
Agreement on politics 4 12

1Base: All, n=750
2NB: Data sourced from a PEW Research Centre Poll of American adults aged 18 and over, conducted via telephone interviews from 10th to 13th May 2007.

ENDS

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