Our topic for Tuesday is the stress -- but also personal growth -- that may result from trying to balance work and family (sometimes also called work-life balance, considering that some people have not started their own families). Our readings include an online paper by Kossek (available in the links section on the right) and pages 367-370 from the textbook. These readings highlight several key issues in the study of work-family-life:

*The work-family interface is usually discussed in terms of "conflict," given that the number of hours in the day is limited and time spent in one domain seemingly cannot be spent in the other. However, there is also a line of argument that one domain can enrich the other, for example, if satisfaction from the job makes one more pleasant at home.

*The types of stress typically studied both in the workplace and at home are interpersonal conflict (e.g., arguments) and overload (e.g., having a lot of tasks to get done).

*Work-family balance has been studied in both directions -- how what happened at work affects the family, and how what goes on in the family may carry over to work.

*Researchers study both within-person effects (how a person's day at work affects the same person at home, or vice versa) and crossover from one person to another. Examples of the latter include how one parent's experience at work during the day affects his or her interactions at home with the spouse or children.

*Many research findings differ according to the gender and social class of the individuals involved.

*Individuals' psychological/personality traits also appear to play a role in moderating the impact of stressors. In other words, having a certain trait (e.g., a sense of mastery or control) may dampen or buffer the connection between a stressful event and one's distress level, whereas other traits (e.g., neuroticism) may exacerbate the connection.

*Modern issues of technology (e.g., telecommuting) and globalization will likely have implications for work and family roles.

Here are a couple of other interesting lines of research:

Kathleen Fuegen, who studied with one of my Michigan grad school classmates, University of Kansas professor Monica Biernat, found evidence in a laboratory experiment suggesting that mothers face discrimination in the workplace.

Here are two additional links to augment the information on the Fuegen and Biernat research. This is a summary of a similar type of study -- using identical resumes -- but where the names of job applicants were designed to be either European-American or African-American sounding. Also, this page from my Texas Tech research methods site explains the logic of the experimental method for demonstrating causality.

A faculty colleague of mine at Texas Tech, Anisa Zvonkovic, studies a particular form of work-family balance, namely the lives of people who spend long amounts of time away from home, such as flight attendants and individuals who work in commercial fishing. She is now launching a new project to expand this research.

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A topic that came up today in our discussion of mental health and that would also appear to have implications for work-family balance is the increase in recent decades of college women's adoption of stereotypically "masculine" traits. This research has been done by Jean Twenge of San Diego State University, and is summarized in her book Generation Me.

What Dr. Twenge did was locate as many studies, published between the 1970s and 1990s, as she could find that reported male and female means on measures of gender roles (masculinity and femininity). To keep things as consistent as possible, so that era was the only thing differing between the studies, she included only studies that used the most prominent measures of gender roles and only those that studied college students. She found 103 samples, which cumulatively consisted of 28,920 students. This excerpt from her book describes the results of her cross-temporal comparison:

The "masculine" scale items included words like competitive, independent, never give up easily, self-reliant, forceful, and ambitious. Sure enough, college women endorsed these traits at a higher rate with every passing year. More than 50% of 1990s women scored as "masculine" on the scale, compared to only 20% of early 1970s women... The change was so large that by the early 1990s men's and women's scores on the scale of so-called masculine traits were indistinguishable (p. 193).