Combining primary and secondary data in a single
study of the implications of marriage structure for men’s attitudes to women in the workplace
In order to understand the implications of marriage structure, Sreedhari et al. (2014) conducted a total of five studies combining the analyses of secondary data from US and UK survey sources with quasi-experiments on managers and undergraduate students. The secondary analyses were based on two sources of data:
Data from the 1996 General Social Survey (GSS), a US national probability survey of adults, focusing on the attitudes of 282 heterosexual married men and analysing items that asked them to indicate their level of agreement/disagreement to questions such as: wife should help husband’s career first’ using a four-point Likert scale, correlating these with the predictor variable marriage structure’, classifying respondents according to traditional’ (wife not employed), semi traditional’ (wife works part-time), and dual earner’ marriage structure. Data from two 2002 surveys, the GSS and the National Organizations Survey (NOS). For the NOS, the employers of some GSS respondents were contacted and asked about employment practices in their firms. Using data from the two surveys enabled organization-level data and responses from individuals to be linked, resulting in a sample of 89 full-time male employees and focusing on the variable perceived smoothness of workplace operations’ and its correlation with the same predictor variable of marriage structure’.
The results from both of these studies indicated that marriage structures predicted how egalitarian men are, those in traditional marriages being more likely to hold negative attitudes toward women in their workplace.
The researchers then conducted a controlled quasi-experiment based on a recruitment scenario on 89 male undergraduate students, which indicated that men from traditional marriage backgrounds were less attracted to organizations with female leaders. This was followed by another quasi-experiment, this time involving a convenience sample of 232 managers recruited from a US accounting organization, to examine whether men in traditional marriage structures were more likely to behave in ways that would prevent women in the organization advancing in their careers. This involved an online organizational simulation, in which the gender of the imaginary potential leader was manipulated. The fifth and final study sought to establish whether the attitudes of men who were single would change their attitudes to those of women in the workplace once they were married. The researchers also wanted to test whether these findings would generalize to a non-US sample. They therefore used data relating to a sample of 304 men from the 1991 and 1993 British Household Panel Survey (BHPS). The sample was comprised of men who were single in the first wave of data collection but had married by the time of the second data collection point. The findings from all five of the studies carried out by Sreedhari et al. (2014) showed that men in traditional marriages tend to hold negative views towards the presence of women in the workplace.
Source: Bell, E., Bryman, A., & Harley, B. (2018). Business research methods. Oxford university press.
Categories