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

1 Introduction

Before industrialisation reorganised family life in the Global North, most societies treated the extended family as the primary institution through which caregiving, material support, and emotional sustenance were distributed among its members. Grandparents, siblings, aunts, and cousins typically lived within walking distance of one another. That proximity made it possible for women to work, travel, and participate in community life because there was always someone nearby to step in. Finch (1989) traced how industrialisation disrupted those arrangements across Europe, drawing workers into cities and separating nuclear households from wider kin. Kagitcibasi (1996) offered a broader cross-cultural account of this divergence, arguing that family systems organised around interdependence, rather than the individuated household structures typical of the Global North, persist wherever economic and cultural conditions continue to reward collective rather than individual functioning. The process was neither rapid nor universal. In much of the Arab world, South Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa, the extended family retained its central social function across the twentieth century and continues to perform that role today (Georgas, 2020; Jaffré et al., 2026; Triandis, 1995).

What that retention looks like in practice has been documented in several settings. Bozalek (1999) showed that Black South African families maintained dense networks of shared obligation in which grandmothers, aunts, and sisters routinely assumed joint responsibility for children and elderly relatives, creating the conditions under which women could participate in paid employment. Bayane (2021) documented how families in South African townships negotiated the employment of domestic workers, showing that kin continued to mediate caregiving arrangements even as those arrangements became commercialised. A related study of precarious work in the same national context found that work-life spillover among South African gig-economy drivers was similarly absorbed through informal family and kin arrangements rather than through employer-provided support (Bayane, 2024), underscoring how family networks routinely substitute for the structural support that formal labour markets do not provide. In the Gulf states, proximity to extended family has historically served a similar function: grandparents and siblings nearby, available without prior arrangement, providing the daily childcare, emotional reassurance, and household assistance that enables a woman to maintain her professional commitments (Georgas, 2020; Triandis, 1995).

The concept of work-life balance was introduced to describe how working adults manage the boundary between these two domains. Clark (2000, p. 751) defined it as “satisfaction and good functioning at work and at home, with a minimum of role conflict.” Greenhaus and Allen (2006) later argued that the relationship between work and family could be enriching as well as conflictual, when individuals have the values alignment and organisational resources to draw benefit from both, a claim formalised the same year in Greenhaus and Powell's (2006) theory of work-family enrichment, which specifies the conditions, resource generation and resource transfer, under which participation in one role improves functioning in the other. Work-family conflict, by contrast, is the condition described by Greenhaus and Beutell (1985, p. 77) as a form of inter-role conflict in which role pressures from work and family are mutually incompatible. Gragnano et al. (2020) added the concept of work-health balance to capture the extent to which physical and psychological wellbeing competes with both domains for finite personal resources. When extended family support disappears, all three forms of balance become harder to sustain simultaneously.

The UAE is an instructive setting in which to examine this. Female labour force participation now stands at just over 54% of the working-age female population (World Bank, 2024), and the country has pursued a sustained programme of female workforce integration, and in 2024 women's participation increased by approximately 20.9% (Gulf News, 2025a). Women now hold positions across government, the professions, and private enterprise at rates that would have been unusual a generation ago, alongside a growing share of women among STEM graduates (Zoe Talent Solutions, 2026). At the same time, internal migration and urban concentration have separated many of those women from the kin networks that their professional participation implicitly depended on. Research specific to the UAE has confirmed that working women in this society regard family-based childcare as both practically superior and culturally appropriate, and that the absence of it creates measurable strain (Begum et al., 2024). The mismatch between what the culture expects and what geography permits is the problem this paper addresses.

Three questions organise the inquiry. First, how does geographic separation from extended family affect the emotional and psychological wellbeing of married working women in the UAE? Second, what strategies do these women use to manage the demands on them, and how effective are those strategies? Third, in what ways do the cultural norms of a collectivist society shape both the difficulties they face and the options available to them?

2 Literature review

The protective function of social support has been well established. Cobb (1976) argued that relationships buffer individuals against the physiological and psychological effects of stress by conveying information that they are cared for, valued, and part of a network of mutual obligation. House (1981) specified four distinct forms of support: emotional, informational, instrumental, and companionship. Cohen and Wills (1985), in a major review that tested the buffering hypothesis empirically, concluded that perceived availability of support matched to the demands of a stressful situation was more protective than support whose function did not fit the need. That finding has direct consequences for the present study. Grandmotherly care is not simply childcare of a certain quality; it is care that arrives unconditionally, without financial transaction, and within a relationship of established trust. Paying a nanny provides instrumental support; it does not provide the relational certainty that kin-based care carries.

French et al. (2018) synthesised findings from 151 studies and confirmed that social support from supervisors, co-workers, and family members significantly reduces perceived work-family conflict. They also noted that support effects were stronger in collectivist cultural settings, suggesting that culture shapes not only who provides support, but what it means to receive it. In societies where family support is expected, its absence may be experienced as a social failure as well as a practical gap. Holt-Lunstad et al. (2015) placed the health consequences of this gap in stark terms: their meta-analytic review of 70 studies found that chronic loneliness and social isolation increase all-cause mortality by 26%, comparable to the risk attributable to smoking fifteen cigarettes per day. Social isolation is, on this evidence, a clinical concern rather than a quality-of-life inconvenience.

Research specifically focused on women in the UAE confirms that these dynamics operate locally. Begum et al. (2024) studied 271 women administrators in UAE higher education and found that work-family imbalance significantly predicted reduced personal wellbeing and organisational effectiveness, with the absence of adequate family support identified as a principal contributing factor. Eagly and Carli (2018) documented how women who enter professional or leadership roles encounter structural disadvantages that compound the pressures arising from domestic circumstances. In the UAE, where women hold only 16.6% of private-sector leadership positions despite constituting 45.4% of the skilled female workforce (Gulf News, 2025b), those structural disadvantages remain in force. Women who cannot rely on family support for childcare are disproportionately likely to limit their professional ambitions or withdraw from work altogether, which reinforces the inequalities they already face.

Hammer et al. (2013) showed that supervisors who provide instrumental assistance, emotional recognition, role modelling, and creative schedule management significantly increase employee job satisfaction and reduce turnover risk. Shuck and Reio (2014) found similar effects from engaged leadership. Both studies noted that family-supportive behaviour at work tends to be distributed unevenly, depending on individual managers rather than on organisational policy, and that this unevenness means the protection it offers is structurally unreliable.

The coping literature offers a framework for understanding how individuals respond to conditions they cannot fully resolve. Lazarus and Folkman (1984) distinguished problem-focused strategies, which reduce or remove the stressor, from emotion-focused strategies, which regulate the distress it generates. Albulescu et al. (2022) demonstrated in a systematic review that even brief restorative breaks during the working day reliably improve wellbeing and performance outcomes. Kim et al. (2018) confirmed this through daily diary methods, showing that micro-breaks enhance performance when overall work engagement is maintained. These findings are relevant because many of the coping practices reported by participants in this study were precisely this kind of small, partial relief: a gym session, a coffee with a spouse, a phone call to a parent. They help. They do not solve the underlying problem.

3 Theoretical framework

Two theoretical frameworks guide the study. They are selected because they operate at complementary levels of analysis, and because their combination generates an account of how kin distance produces psychological harm that neither framework produces on its own.

3.1 Social support theory

Social Support Theory, as developed by Cobb (1976), Cassel (1976), and House (1981), holds that social relationships protect individuals against the damaging effects of stress by providing resources that buffer the impact of stressful events. The four forms of support identified by House (1981) are distinct in function: emotional support communicates that the individual is cared for and valued; informational support provides guidance relevant to the problem; instrumental support offers tangible help such as childcare or money; and companionship support conveys a sense of belonging. Cohen and Wills (1985) established that the protective effect of support is greatest when the form of support provided matches the demand the stressor creates.

For married working women in the UAE, extended family has historically provided all four forms simultaneously and as a matter of course. When that network is geographically inaccessible, the loss is not simply one of practical convenience. It is the loss of a relational infrastructure whose value lies partly in its unconditional character. Paid substitutes can provide instrumental support; they cannot easily provide the emotional security or the sense of social belonging that kin relationships carry. The theory therefore directs attention not only to what is functionally absent but to why the absence is experienced as more serious than a simple enumeration of missing tasks would suggest.

3.2 Role strain theory

Goode (1960) argued that because individuals simultaneously occupy multiple social roles whose demands are inherently in tension, some degree of role strain is a structural feature of social life rather than a personal failing. He identified three forms. Role overload occurs when the total volume of demands across all roles exceeds the individual's available time and energy. Role conflict occurs when the expectations of two roles are fundamentally incompatible, so that performing one adequately requires failing at the other. Role captivity occurs when an individual feels obligated to remain in a role from which she would prefer to withdraw.

All three forms are present for women in the situation this study examines. Without proximate family, the caregiving and household tasks that kin would absorb fall entirely to the woman and her spouse, creating role overload. The cultural expectation that she will meet Emirati standards of family devotion while also meeting professional standards creates role 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, which produces role captivity. Role Strain Theory explains not just that these women are stressed, but why their situation is structurally difficult to escape.

3.3 The integrated framework

The two theories connect through a straightforward causal logic. Social Support Theory identifies what is lost: the buffer that family proximity provides against the accumulation of demands. Role Strain Theory identifies the mechanism by which that loss becomes harm: demands accumulate beyond the individual's capacity to absorb them, and the forms of strain that result are reinforced by cultural expectations that do not adjust to reduced resources. In the UAE context, collectivist norms assign high moral weight to family obligations and attach social expectations to women's educational and professional roles (Jaffré et al., 2026). Women who cannot rely on family support are therefore penalised twice: once by the practical deficit, and again by the cultural expectation that they will perform as though the deficit did not exist (see Figure 1).

4 Methodology

The study used qualitative semi-structured interviews and thematic analysis. A qualitative design fits the research questions because they concern how women interpret and make sense of their circumstances, not how frequently particular outcomes occur across a population. Creswell and Poth (2024) and Kvale and Brinkmann (2009) situate this kind of inquiry within a broadly interpretivist tradition.

4.1 Sampling and recruitment

Participants were selected using purposive sampling with three eligibility criteria: being married and in paid employment at the time of interview; living or working in Abu Dhabi or Dubai; and residing at least two hours' travel time from the nearest extended family members who would ordinarily provide regular support. The two-hour threshold was operationalised through direct screening questions: prospective participants were asked where their nearest family members lived and how long it would take to visit them on a typical day. Two hours was chosen because it rules out the spontaneous daily contact that defines the practical contribution of proximate kin. A grandmother who lives thirty minutes away can collect children from school; one who lives three hours away cannot.

Participants were recruited through the researcher's professional and social networks, supplemented by snowball referrals. Maximum-variation sampling was applied across five dimensions: age, professional sector, number of children, years of residence in the current city, and distance from extended family. Where participants were known to the researcher professionally, the independence of the study from any existing work relationship was made explicit, and participants were told that their decision to take part or to decline would have no professional consequence.

Fifteen women participated (N = 15). Guest et al. (2006) demonstrated in an empirical saturation study that core themes stabilise after approximately twelve interviews under conditions of purposive sampling. After every three interviews in this study, a saturation review was conducted to check whether new themes or dimensions were still emerging. By the fifteenth interview, the data were generating no substantially new material.

4.2 Participants

Table 1 summarises the sample. Ages ranged from 25 to 48 years; the initial target range was 25 to 38, but this was extended to secure sufficient sectoral diversity and achieve saturation. Thirteen participants were based in Abu Dhabi and two in Dubai. Professional backgrounds included public administration, higher education, healthcare insurance, banking, the police service, communications, and information technology. Three participants had no children; the remaining twelve had between one and five. All participants lived at least two hours' travel time from their nearest extended family, with distances ranging up to three hours.

Table 1. Summary of participants.

P3 and P14 had no children at the time of the study. P9 and P13 are older than the initial target age range of 25 to 38 years; the range was extended to achieve sectoral diversity and data saturation. All fifteen participants were married and in paid employment at the time of their interview.

4.3 Data collection

All interviews were conducted via Microsoft Teams, at times chosen by participants to minimise disruption to their working and family schedules. Conducting the interviews online also meant that no participant was placed in a workplace setting where her employer could become aware of her participation. Each interview lasted between thirty and sixty minutes. The schedule covered four areas: the experience of living at distance from family; how participants managed the competing demands on their time and energy; their perceptions of how their workplaces responded to their situation; and the role of cultural expectations in shaping their experience. Interviews were recorded with consent, transcribed verbatim, and anonymised using pseudonyms. Field notes were kept throughout to capture observations that audio recordings could not.

4.4 Analysis

Braun and Clarke's (2006) six-phase thematic analysis procedure was followed. In Phase 1, the researcher read all fifteen transcripts alongside the field notes several times, making initial observations. In Phase 2, meaningful units of data were coded systematically across the full dataset. In Phase 3, codes were grouped into candidate themes capturing shared patterns. In Phase 4, the candidate themes were tested against the full dataset to confirm internal coherence and clear boundaries between themes. In Phase 5, each theme was named and defined precisely. In Phase 6, the themes were written up as an interpretive narrative, supported by participant quotations and connected throughout to the theoretical framework.

NVivo 14 supported the coding, memo writing, and audit trail (Bazeley and Jackson, 2013). To strengthen the analysis, a second researcher independently coded 20% of the transcripts; any discrepancies between the two sets of codes were resolved through discussion. Credibility was further addressed through member checking of preliminary themes with a subset of participants. Transferability is supported by the detailed contextual account of the sample and setting provided in this section. Dependability rests on the maintained audit trail. Confirmability was addressed through reflexive journalling throughout (Lincoln and Guba, 1985).

4.5 Ethics

Ethical approval was granted by the Rabdan Academy Research Ethics Committee. Prior to the interviews, each participant received an electronic participant information sheet and informed consent form via email or Microsoft Teams. Participants were given sufficient time to review the study information and ask any questions before returning the signed consent form electronically. Written informed consent was obtained from all participants before data collection commenced. Participants were told they could withdraw at any time without consequence. Data were stored on password-protected university servers accessible only to the research team. Participants who showed signs of emotional distress during the interview were given information about available support services.

5 Findings

Analysis produced four themes: the emotional weight of family distance; the strategies participants used to carry that weight; how their employers responded; and the cultural expectations that defined what was at stake. The themes are not independent. Each shapes and is shaped by the others. Together they describe a situation in which the structural removal of a support network generates pressures that no individual strategy can fully absorb.

5.1 The emotional weight of family distance

Every participant described some form of persistent emotional strain attributable directly to geographic separation from family. The strain participants described was rarely acute in its expression; it manifested instead as a persistent background condition, low in immediate intensity but continuous and without evident resolution. What the participants described is consistent with what Social Support Theory predicts when the buffering function of relationships is withdrawn (Cobb, 1976; Cohen and Wills, 1985): ordinary demands become harder to sustain because the threshold of stress has been lowered by the absence of relational resources.

P1 described her situation plainly: “My situation is tense because my family lives two and a half hours away. I only see them once or twice a month, and that affects me emotionally.”

The significance of the frequency she reports is not simply that it is low in absolute terms. In Emirati family culture, near-daily contact with parents and siblings is normal. Seeing them once a month represents a substantial departure from what both P1 and her family regard as the appropriate relational rhythm. P7 described where that sustained background tension can lead: “Sometimes, I feel so overwhelmed that I start thinking of quitting my job just to regain balance.”

The thought of resignation as a response to emotional overload is consistent with Hammer et al.'s (2013) finding that turnover intention rises sharply among employees whose family circumstances are not adequately supported by their organisations. P7 had not resigned. But she had been close.

The consequences of family distance were not always merely contemplated. P10 had acted on them: “I moved closer to my family, even though it meant living apart from my husband, who still works in Abu Dhabi.”

She chose physical separation from her spouse rather than continued physical separation from her parents. That choice reveals something about the relative weight she assigned to these two relationships under pressure, and about the severity of the deficit that family distance had created. P13 described a different form of compounded isolation:

“I travelled for two years with my kids, without my husband, to complete my PhD. It was the toughest time of my life, being away from both my husband and extended family.”

Educational advancement and emotional vulnerability occupied the same two years.

The most concentrated account of multiple simultaneous absences came from P4:

“I went through a very tough time alone. Even during an emergency surgery, I had to enter the operating room without any family by my side. As a single mother without family support, I have had to rely completely on myself, both emotionally and financially.”

House (1981) identified four forms of support. In that operating room, P4 had none of them. The account is not presented here because it is exceptional, but because it makes visible in an acute form what most participants experienced chronically and at lower intensity.

Several participants described how the absence of extended family had changed their marriages. The common direction of change was toward greater relational intensity rather than away from it. Without family to absorb some of the practical and emotional weight, couples became more dependent on one another and more deliberately attentive to their relationship. P3 described it this way:

“We have become more of a team. We talk more, plan more, and we are closer because we have to rely on each other.”

This is consistent with what Bianchi and Milkie (2010) found regarding spousal resource-sharing under external stress; the relational benefit, however, arrived alongside an increased domestic burden that the couple now carried without external help. P11 described the operational realities:

“Sometimes, I had to stay in the hospital with my child for weeks, which meant being absent from work, while my husband took care of the other kids at home.”

The absence of extended family in such moments meant that the couple bore the full practical and emotional weight of a medical crisis without external support. Role Strain Theory accounts for this clearly: when kin proximity is lost, the total volume of demands falling on the individual and her spouse increases beyond what either was designed to absorb alone (Goode, 1960). The response, in many cases, was not withdrawal from either role but deliberate and active investment in the marital relationship as a substitute resource.

P12 described how she and her husband protected their connection:

“When the kids are asleep, my husband and I go out for coffee together. It is a much-needed break and helps me recharge.”

That act of deliberate protection, brief and simple as it sounds, reflects the degree to which the relationship required active maintenance under pressure.

5.2 How participants managed

Across the dataset, participants used two broad categories of strategy, following the distinction Lazarus and Folkman (1984) drew between attempts to change the situation and attempts to manage the feelings it generates. Neither category produced a solution. The problem-focused strategies reduced some of the practical burden without restoring what kin proximity had provided. The emotion-focused strategies sustained participants' capacity to continue without addressing the conditions that generated the strain.

The most widely described problem-focused response was the redistribution of household and caregiving work between spouses. Without family to call on, couples developed explicit arrangements for covering the tasks that a grandmother or sister would previously have handled:

“We had to develop a schedule of duties. My husband and I share everything now because there is no one else to help” [P2].

The word “schedule” is telling. Tasks that kin would have managed informally, responsively, and without prior arrangement now required deliberate planning. That is not a complaint about the spouse; it is an observation about the character of kin support, which is available without transaction in a way that spousal cooperation, however willing, cannot fully replicate.

Paid childcare was the other main problem-focused strategy, and participants were consistent in how they described the limits of it: “I had to rely on daycare. It adds another layer of responsibility and cost, and it is not the same as having your mother or sister nearby” [P1].

Those who could afford domestic workers described them in similar terms: “I delegate tasks to a nanny I trust who stays at home with the kids” [P4];

“I rely on a trusted nanny to take care of the kids at home, which helps me manage my responsibilities better” [P9].

The word “trust” appears in both accounts. With family, trust is given. With paid carers, it must be earned and sustained. Cohen and Wills (1985) established that the protective effect of support depends on its fit with the demands of the stressful situation. Paid care fits some of those demands; it does not fit the relational ones.

Emotion-focused strategies were varied and, on their own terms, often genuinely helpful. P2 described a combination that many participants used in some form:

“I am always in touch with my family. I call them regularly. I have also built new social networks that have become like family to me. And whenever I feel stressed from work, marriage, or being far from home, I find strength by praying to God.”

Physical activity was cited by several participants as a primary means of recovery:

“I go to the gym every day, and I consider that my way of relieving stress” [P8].

Brief social outings served a similar function: “I sometimes take short trips with a close friend to recharge and get a break from work and family responsibilities” [P11].

These practices align with what Albulescu et al. (2022) established about the protective value of restorative breaks, and with Kim et al.'s (2018) evidence that micro-breaks support performance when overall engagement remains high. Their protective effect, however, is temporary. They restore the individual's capacity to continue; they do not change the conditions that deplete that capacity. One participant, P7, had sought structural support through professional coaching: “I used to work with a life coach to better understand myself and find new ways to achieve balance.” That step reflects something worth noting: managing multiple demanding roles in the absence of support is not only practically difficult; it requires a kind of sustained self-management that some participants experienced as a skill to be developed.

5.3 How employers responded

Participants described their workplaces as occasionally helpful and systematically insufficient. The help they received was real and appreciated, but it was informal, unpredictable, and dependent on who their line manager happened to be. This matches the structural problem that Hammer et al. (2013) and French et al. (2018) identified: family-supportive supervisor behaviour, however effective when it occurs, is not a reliable organisational resource because it is not an organisational commitment.

P8 described a typical example of the kind of flexibility that mattered: “Sometimes, my manager lets me leave early if something urgent comes up with my kids. That makes a big difference.”

The word “sometimes” is important. The flexibility was conditional, not guaranteed. On a different day, with a less sympathetic manager, it might not have been available. P7 described a more structural intervention, and its effects were proportionally larger:

“Recently, my work allowed us one online day a week and flexible working hours, and that is really what helped me tolerate everything. I was on the edge so many times, thinking of quitting.”

The phrase “on the edge” is not rhetorical. P7 had been close to resigning before the remote working arrangement was introduced. Its introduction kept her in post. In a context where the UAE has set national targets for female workforce participation and where 70% of university graduates are women (Al-Naqbi and Aderibigbe, 2024), retaining women who are at the edge of leaving because their family circumstances are unsupported is both a human resource issue and a policy one.

What was absent from most participants’ accounts was any sense that their organisations had a considered response to employees in their situation. Flexibility existed where managers chose to offer it. Structural arrangements such as remote working had been introduced where organisations had made that decision for general operational reasons. None of the participants described policies specifically designed to support women living without proximate family. The gap between goodwill and policy, which Shuck and Reio (2014) identified as a characteristic feature of workplace wellbeing support, was present across the sample.

5.4 Cultural expectations and their consequences

The cultural dimension of participants’ experience operated in a specific and identifiable way. It did not simply add pressure to an already pressured situation. It removed the possibility of adjusting expectations to reflect reduced resources. In the UAE, as in other collectivist societies, a woman's obligations to her family are not negotiable in proportion to her circumstances. P4 named this 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 (1960) theorised: the demands of the role are maintained at the level the culture sets, regardless of the resources the individual actually has. The gap between what is expected and what is possible does not produce a revision of the expectation; it produces guilt.

The effort participants invested to close that gap was visible in their accounts. P15 described how she had previously driven to her family on weekends:

“Because of my husband's shift work, I used to drive on weekends to visit my family. But now, with two kids, one of them a newborn, it has become difficult, so I only manage to visit once a month.”

She did not describe this as an acceptable adaptation. She described it as a loss. The reduction in visit frequency carried moral weight, not just logistical inconvenience, because in her cultural context frequent family contact is a value rather than a preference. Social Support Theory captures part of what is at stake here; but the theory was developed in Western contexts where the emotional significance of kin proximity is generally lower. In the UAE, the relational meaning of family support is inseparable from its practical function, and the loss of the practice is therefore also a loss of the relational identity it sustains.

6 Discussion

The four themes describe a coherent process. Geographic distance from family removes a support infrastructure whose value extends beyond the tasks it performs. The removal intensifies role demands. The intensified demands cannot be fully addressed by the coping strategies available to individuals who lack institutional support. And the cultural context ensures that the standards against which performance is measured do not fall in proportion to the resources available to meet them. The analytical framework this study uses, Social Support Theory and Role Strain Theory in combination, explains why the process has this shape. Social Support Theory identifies the nature and extent of what is lost. Role Strain Theory identifies the mechanism through which loss becomes accumulated harm.

6.1 The cultural intensification of strain

Holt-Lunstad et al. (2015) established that social isolation is a mortality risk. Gragnano et al. (2020) established that work-health imbalance independently predicts reduced wellbeing. A comparable pattern has been documented in other occupational populations exposed to sustained stress without adequate structural support: Al-Tamimi et al. (2024) found that hospital staff working prolonged shifts under pandemic conditions showed significant declines in mental health and sleep function, effects that persisted for as long as the underlying stressor remained unaddressed. These findings hold across the cultural contexts in which they were tested. What the present study adds is an account of a mechanism specific to high-context collectivist settings: the maintenance of role expectations regardless of available resources. Participants were not simply isolated. They were isolated and simultaneously expected to perform as though they were not. The cultural pressure did not create the strain; the geographic separation did. But the cultural pressure prevented any legitimate reduction in the standard of performance that would have allowed the strain to be more honestly accommodated. That gap between the demand and the acknowledged reality is what distinguishes the experience of family distance in this context from what the existing literature, largely conducted in Western settings, has described.

6.2 Coping: resourceful but structurally outmatched

Participants' coping repertoires were varied and genuinely adaptive. Spousal role redistribution, outsourced childcare, peer network construction, religious practice, and physical self-care all reduced the difficulty of the situation to some degree. Lazarus and Folkman (1984) would recognise both problem-focused and emotion-focused strategies in the data. Bianchi and Milkie (2010) would recognise the relational strengthening that occurred in some marriages. Albulescu et al. (2022) would recognise the micro-restorative practices as evidence-based responses to depletion. The consistent limitation, however, was stated by participants themselves: 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. The coping strategies were not inadequate in themselves; they were outmatched by the scale of the deficit they were asked to address.

6.3 The case for institutionalised support

These findings suggest that structural workplace flexibility, including remote working arrangements, contribute to workforce retention among married working women experiencing distal family distance.

Hammer et al. (2013) showed that family-supportive supervisor behaviour reduces turnover intention. The present data suggest that the benefit is not primarily attitudinal. It is about whether women can remain in employment at all. With women's UAE workforce participation having increased by nearly 21% in 2024 (Gulf News, 2025a), and with 45.4% of the skilled female workforce currently female but only 16.% of private-sector leadership positions occupied by women (Gulf News, 2025b), 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. ad hoc managerial goodwill is not a sufficient mechanism for this. It is inconsistent, invisible to the organisation, and non-transferable when managers change. Formalised policies, remote working arrangements, predictable flexible scheduling, subsidised childcare, and employee assistance programmes with family-relevant scope, are the institutional equivalents of the support that family proximity would otherwise provide.

6.4 What the theoretical frameworks add

Two features of the findings extend what Social Support Theory and Role Strain Theory, as developed in Western contexts, would predict on their own. First, the cultural embeddedness of family support in the UAE means that losing it is not simply a matter of losing a service. It involves a partial loss of social identity and relational recognition that functionally adequate substitutes do not restore. Cohen and Wills (1985) argued that support must fit the demand to be effective. In collectivist settings, the cultural meaning of support is part of the demand it is expected to address. Paid care does not address the cultural meaning dimension; it addresses only the practical one. Second, Goode's (1960) Role Strain Theory, applied to this setting, reveals that role expectations function not as flexible responses to circumstances but as cultural constants against which individuals are judged regardless of whether their circumstances permit them to be met. This is a more severe form of role strain than the theory was originally designed to describe, 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 institutional and policy responses are not optional supplements to individual coping but necessary preconditions for it.

Taken together, the findings make three specific contributions. Theoretically, the study identifies a mechanism not captured in existing Western-oriented work-family research: the way in which collectivist cultural norms maintain family performance standards regardless of the practical resources available to meet them. That mechanism explains why distal family distance is more damaging in the UAE than an equivalent reduction of practical support would be in an individualistic cultural context. Empirically, the study provides detailed qualitative evidence from a population that has received limited research attention, tracing the cascade from geographic separation through resource depletion and role strain to emotional and career outcomes. Practically, the analysis identifies three points at which intervention is feasible: formalisation of organisational family-supportive policy, expansion of affordable childcare provision, and investment in community peer networks capable of replicating the relational character of kinship solidarity.

7 Limitations

Fifteen participants are consistent with what the qualitative literature recommends for thematic analysis under purposive sampling, but it limits the range of experiences captured and the confidence with which findings can be transferred to other populations. The sample focuses on married women; the experiences of single mothers, child-free women, and male professionals managing family distance remain unexamined. The geographic focus on Abu Dhabi and Dubai limits transferability to smaller Emirati cities and to other Gulf states where policy environments, family structures, and cultural norms may differ.

Online interviews, conducted via Microsoft Teams, protected participants from employer awareness but reduced the richness of non-verbal observation available to the researcher. Cultural norms of emotional restraint in Emirati society may mean some participants described their situations as less difficult than they actually were. Snowball recruitment introduces selection effects: women with very constrained schedules or very limited professional networks were less likely to be referred and therefore less likely to participate. Longitudinal research that tracked the same women over time would produce a more dynamic account of how coping strategies and wellbeing change as family circumstances evolve. Comparative research across Gulf Cooperation Council states would establish whether the mechanism this study identifies is specific to the UAE or more widely distributed.

8 Conclusion

This study set out to examine how geographic separation from extended family shapes the wellbeing, coping, and professional lives of married working women in the UAE, and to situate those experiences within Social Support Theory and Role Strain Theory. The findings establish that distal family distance operates as a cascading structural condition: geographic separation reduces access to kin-based support, intensifies role strain across professional and domestic domains, and narrows the space available for coping. What distinguishes this dynamic from comparable phenomena in individualistic societies is the cultural amplification that collectivist norms impose on it.

In the UAE context, family support carries relational and social meaning that paid or organisational substitutes cannot replicate, and cultural expectations of family performance do not recede when the resources to meet those expectations are absent (Jaffré et al., 2026). This finding extends both frameworks beyond their original Western-oriented formulations and contributes a transferable mechanism for understanding how kin-based support operates differently in high-context collectivist settings, a question that scholarship in comparable Gulf and Arab contexts has raised but not yet systematically resolved (Bayane, 2021; Begum et al., 2024). Three practical implications follow.

UAE employers should treat family-supportive arrangements, including remote working, predictable flexible scheduling, and subsidised 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 organisations should develop peer networks explicitly designed to replicate the relational, not merely the functional, character of kinship solidarity. These are structural preconditions for sustaining female workforce participation, not peripheral welfare considerations. The study is bounded by its sample size, geographic focus, and cross-sectional design; future research should pursue comparative and longitudinal inquiry across Gulf Cooperation Council states to establish whether the mechanism identified here is specific to the UAE or more widely distributed.

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Footnotes

Edited by: Vanessa Mertins, University of Vechta, Germany

Reviewed by: Percyval Bayane, University of South Africa, South Africa

Fatimah Adesanya, Sheffield Hallam University, United Kingdom