Couples' long-term pattern of favoring one spouse's career in major decisions is thought to affect occupational trajectories, but current research has looked only at short-term effects of single decisions. This article applies a new technique, the interpolated curves approach, to represent and compare life course patterns of major career-prioritizing decisions, using in-depth data from 51 couples. Five clusters of career hierarchy patterns are identified; the patterns predict income better than summary measures of career hierarchy, including average individual career gains to decisions and self-reported career priority. Findings are significant for wives, and are similar but weaker for husbands.

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This paper addresses the relationship between individual-level work-to-family and family-to-work spillover and two country-level policy measures: childcare policy and maximum work hour legislation. Coupling Gornick and Meyers' (Families that work: policies for reconciling parenthood and employment, 2003) policy measures with individual-level data (N = 7,895) from the 2002 International Social Survey Programme, the authors analyze whether men and women in countries with stronger childcare policies and maximum work-hour legislation exhibit work-to-family and family-to-work spillover. The authors find that neither childcare policy nor maximum work-hour legislation is significantly associated with workto-family spillover. Stronger childcare policy is associated with lower family-to-work spillover for women, especially for women with young children. Maximum-hour legislation is associated with greater family-to-work spillover for women, with a significantly larger effect for mothers of young children.

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Members of social categories with multifaceted definitions are often sampled using only one or two characteristics, generating theoretical and methodological problems. Here, the author examines the case of “dual-career” couples. The author tests how closely respondents' and scholars' distinctions between careers versus jobs correspond and how well selected definition models capture career-oriented couples. Members of fifty-one married couples self-identify as having a job or career and then explain how they differentiate those concepts. Respondents' rationales correspond well to scholarly definitions, focusing primarily on time and emotional investments, and less on advancement or income. Work orientation generally varies, as predicted, by education and work characteristics, although many people presumed to be career-oriented report having jobs (e.g., professional women), and vice versa (e.g., part-time workers). Systematic tests of definition models suggest that many sampling approaches used in dual-career couple studies either omit many career-oriented respondents or include many who are job-oriented. Sampling strategies are discussed.