The study, conducted by Asma Alnuaimi of Rabdan Academy in Abu Dhabi, interviewed fifteen married working women living in Abu Dhabi and Dubai, all of whom were at least two hours’ travel from their nearest extended family. Using a six-phase thematic analysis guided by Social Support Theory and Role Strain Theory, the research identified four interlocking themes: sustained emotional strain, coping strategies that helped but did not resolve the underlying deficit, organizational support that depended on individual managers rather than policy, and cultural expectations that refused to shrink even as the resources available to meet them disappeared.

The setting matters. Female labor force participation in the UAE now stands at just over 54 percent of the working-age female population, according to World Bank data cited in the study, and women’s participation increased by roughly 20.9 percent in 2024 alone. Women hold positions across government, the professions, and private enterprise at rates that would have been unusual a generation ago, and they make up a growing share of STEM graduates. Yet internal migration and urban concentration have pulled many of these women away from the kin networks their professional participation implicitly depended on. Grandparents, siblings, aunts, and cousins who once lived within walking distance now sit hours away by car, unreachable for the spontaneous school pickup or the emergency hospital stay.

The theoretical architecture of the study draws on two complementary frameworks. Social Support Theory, developed by researchers including Cobb, Cassel, and House, holds that relationships buffer individuals against stress by providing four distinct resources: emotional support that communicates being cared for, informational support that offers guidance, instrumental support that supplies tangible help such as childcare, and companionship support that conveys belonging. Cohen and Wills established in a landmark 1985 review that the protective effect of support is greatest when the form of support matches the demand the stressor creates. For married working women in the UAE, extended family historically provided all four forms simultaneously and without transaction. A paid nanny can supply instrumental support; she cannot easily supply the relational certainty that kin-based care carries, the unconditional availability that arrives without negotiation or fee.

Role Strain Theory, formulated by Goode in 1960, explains what happens when that buffer is removed. Goode identified three forms of strain: role overload, when the total volume of demands exceeds available time and energy; role conflict, when the expectations of two roles are fundamentally incompatible; and role captivity, when an individual feels obligated to remain in a role from which she would prefer to withdraw. All three are present in the lives of the women Alnuaimi studied. Without proximate family, caregiving and household tasks fall entirely to the woman and her spouse, creating overload. The cultural expectation that she will meet Emirati standards of family devotion while also meeting professional standards creates conflict, because the resources required to satisfy both simultaneously do not exist. And many of these women cannot leave their jobs without severe financial consequences, nor can they openly reduce their family engagement without social cost, producing captivity.

The interviews revealed how this plays out in practice. One participant described seeing her family only once or twice a month, a frequency that represents a substantial departure from the near-daily contact that is normal in Emirati family culture. Another said she sometimes felt so overwhelmed that she considered quitting her job just to regain balance, a sentiment consistent with research showing that turnover intention rises sharply among employees whose family circumstances are not adequately supported by their organizations. One woman had acted on those feelings, moving closer to her family even though it meant living apart from her husband, who still worked in Abu Dhabi. Another described entering emergency surgery without any family member by her side, relying completely on herself both emotionally and financially while raising children as a single mother in effect if not in law.

Notably, the absence of extended family did not always weaken marriages; in several cases it intensified them. Couples became more dependent on one another and more deliberately attentive to their relationship. One participant described how she and her husband had become more of a team, talking more, planning more, and growing closer because they had to rely on each other. Another described going out for coffee with her husband after the children fell asleep, a small ritual of deliberate protection that reflects the degree to which the relationship required active maintenance under pressure. This finding aligns with research on spousal resource-sharing under external stress, though the relational benefit arrived alongside an increased domestic burden that the couple now carried without external help.

The coping strategies participants employed were varied and, on their own terms, often genuinely adaptive. Problem-focused approaches included redistributing household and caregiving work between spouses through explicit schedules, relying on paid daycare, and delegating tasks to trusted nannies. Emotion-focused approaches included regular phone calls to family, building new social networks that became like family, prayer, daily gym sessions, and short trips with close friends. These practices align with a substantial evidence base: a 2022 systematic review and meta-analysis found that even brief restorative breaks during the working day reliably improve wellbeing and performance, and daily diary research has confirmed that micro-breaks enhance performance when overall work engagement is maintained. But the consistent limitation, stated by participants themselves, was that none of these strategies fully replaced what family proximity had provided. Paid childcare introduced transaction costs, financial and emotional, that kin care did not carry. Spousal collaboration was available only at the end of a working day that had already depleted both partners. Physical self-care provided temporary restoration without structural change.

Workplace support emerged as occasionally helpful and systematically insufficient. Some managers allowed early departure for family emergencies; one organization introduced one online day per week with flexible working hours, an intervention that one participant credited with keeping her in post after she had been on the edge of quitting multiple times. But the help was informal, unpredictable, and dependent on who the line manager happened to be. No participant described policies specifically designed to support women living without proximate family. This matches what Hammer and colleagues identified in their work on family-supportive supervisor behavior: such behavior, however effective when it occurs, is not a reliable organizational resource because it is not an organizational commitment. The gap between goodwill and policy was present across the entire sample.

Perhaps the most distinctive finding concerns culture. In the UAE, as in other collectivist societies, a woman’s obligations to her family are not negotiable in proportion to her circumstances. One participant put it directly: culturally, people assume there is always family support, but when you do not have it, you are still expected to manage everything perfectly. What she describes is precisely the role conflict and role captivity that Goode theorized, but in a more severe form than the theory was originally designed to capture, because it removes the possibility of legitimate renegotiation. Women in the UAE cannot openly reduce their family commitments without social cost; they cannot fully meet them without practical resources they do not have. The result is a form of strain that is structurally irresolvable at the individual level, which is why the study argues that institutional and policy responses are not optional supplements to individual coping but necessary preconditions for it.

The stakes extend beyond individual wellbeing. A meta-analytic review of seventy studies found that chronic loneliness and social isolation increase all-cause mortality by twenty-six percent, a risk comparable to smoking fifteen cigarettes per day. Work-health imbalance independently predicts reduced wellbeing. Against this backdrop, the study’s practical implications are concrete: UAE employers should treat family-supportive arrangements, including remote working, predictable flexible scheduling, and subsidized childcare, as structural features of employment rather than discretionary concessions. Policymakers should expand access to affordable, high-quality childcare so that women without proximate family are not solely reliant on costly private provision. Community organizations should develop peer networks explicitly designed to replicate the relational, not merely the functional, character of kinship solidarity. With women constituting forty-five point four percent of the skilled female workforce but holding only sixteen point six percent of private-sector leadership positions, retaining women who are considering leaving because their domestic circumstances are inadequately supported is among the more practical things UAE employers can do to close the gap. The study is bounded by its sample size, geographic focus on Abu Dhabi and Dubai, and cross-sectional design, and the author calls for comparative and longitudinal research across Gulf Cooperation Council states to establish whether the mechanism identified here is specific to the UAE or more widely distributed across collectivist societies undergoing rapid economic transformation.

Subject of Research: The impact of geographic distance from extended family on social support, role strain, and wellbeing among married working women in the United Arab Emirates

Article Title: Extended family distance, social support, and wellbeing among married working women in the United Arab Emirates

Article References: Alnuaimi, A. (2026). Extended family distance, social support, and wellbeing among married working women in the United Arab Emirates. Frontiers in Behavioral Economics, 5, Article 1872079. https://doi.org/10.3389/frbhe.2026.1872079

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/frbhe.2026.1872079

Keywords: extended family distance, social support, role strain, work-family conflict, UAE working women, collectivist culture, wellbeing, thematic analysis, workplace flexibility, childcare, Abu Dhabi, Dubai