Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Sociology of Social Policy

First data collection completed [29.03.2019]

predictedfairnessIn August and September 2018, our module „Subjective Fairness of Within-Couple Inequalities in Ownership and Control of Savings“ was collected as part of the GESIS Panel. The GESIS Panel, a probability-based mixed-mode access panel, collects data every two months and offers the social science community an opportunity to collect survey data for their research projects.

In our study, we use a factorial survey experiment to examine the following question: How do individuals judge the fairness of different savings arrangements (ownership and control) within married couples? In order to answer this research question, the respondents were asked to evaluate five different scenarios of a hypothetical couple. The scenarios describe different degrees of inequality in ownership (i.e., who formally owns the savings) and control (i.e., who decides when and for what the savings are spent) of a couple’s savings. We have presented first results at the GESIS Panel User Conference in March 2019. The results show that respondents evaluate situations as fairest when spouses have a joint account with equal control. This suggests that the norm of marital sharing is widespread. Furthermore, we show that the control dimension is more important for fairness evaluation than the ownership dimension.