Research Findings: Expat Spouses in India

Thank you very much to all of you who generously contributed your time to the research study: Psychological Adjustment of Female Expatriate Spouses in India - Contributing Roles of Personality, Conformity to Feminine Norms and Feminist Identity. Here are the results of the study for your interest. Best Wishes, Simone

A key contributing factor for completion of expatriate employees’ international assignments is the successful adaptation of their spouses. Respondents of this study were Protected content age = 42 years, SD = 10.23) female expatriate spouses living in India who completed the online survey assessing the key study variables. Six hierarchical multiple regression analyses were conducted to investigate if conformity to feminine norms and feminist identity accounted for an additional significant amount of variance in psychological adjustment, over and above the variance explained by multicultural personality traits.

Results revealed that multicultural personality traits accounted for a significant proportion of variance ( Protected content ) in all three measures of psychological adjustment, with emotional stability explaining significant unique variance in depression (15%), anxiety (13%), stress (23%), negative affect (25%) and life satisfaction (5%). Conformity to feminine norms contributed a further significant amount of variance (2%) in positive affect. However, feminist identity did not account for significant amount of variance in any psychological adjustment measures, after controlling for multicultural personality traits and conformity to feminine norms.

This study provided further support for multicultural personality traits as a key contributor in the psychological adjustment of expatriate spouses. Emotional stability explained the greatest amount of variance in spouse’s psychological adjustment. Emotional stability refers to keeping calm under stressful conditions. Spouses with low levels of emotional stability are potentially vulnerable to reduced psychological adjustment in difficult expatriate postings and may benefit from targeted organisational and social support. Furthermore, involvement with children being associated with positive mood states highlighted the advantages of accepting expatriate postings with dependent children.