Confirmed Presenters and Session Summaries

Tammy D. Allen, PhD
Associate Professor
Department of Psychology
University of South Florida

Title and Description: Flexible Work Arrangements: Help or Hype?

Flexible work arrangements have been cited as key to helping employees manage work and nonwork responsibilities. Despite the positive press given to flextime work arrangements, research results regarding their efficacy in terms of preventing work-family conflict are inconsistent. Moreover, researchers are beginning to recognize that access to flexible work arrangements (FWA) alone is not a panacea to the successful management of work and family roles. The heterogeneity associated with the research findings regarding FWA is underscored by two recent meta-analytic studies. Specifically, one study reported a meta-analytic effect size of -.30 between flexibility and work interference with family (WIF) and of -.17 with family interference with work (FIW). In contrast, the other meta-analytic study reported an effect size of .00 with WIF and .06 with FIW. The inconsistencies found even within meta-analytic research suggest that there is a great deal of variation associated with the effectiveness of FWA. This presentation will review the conditions under which flexible work arrangements are more or less effective. The research to be presented includes both a review of the existing literature and the results of an empirical investigation designed to reveal several moderators of the relationship between FWA and work-family conflict. The empirical research examines flexibility access in terms of time and location and both directions of work-family conflict.

Rosalind Chait Barnett, PhD
Senior Scientist
Director of Community, Families & Work Program
Women's Studies Research Center
Brandeis University

Title and Description: Effects of Maternal Shift Work on Mothers’, Fathers’, and Children’s Well-being Outcomes

Although the majority of U.S. employees work nonstandard hours, little systematic research has been addressed to the effects of shift work within families. I will present new data from a study of 55 dual-earner families, 30 with a mother who regularly worked day shifts and 25 with a mother who regularly worked evening shifts, and their 73 school-age children, 8-13 years of age. Data were collected separately from the mothers, fathers, and children. Results include findings on the within-couple effects of different work schedules on each partner’s psychological well-being and work-family conflict, the linkages between maternal shift work and fathers’ parenting involvement, and the within-family effects of maternal shift work on children’s socioemotional behavior

Suzanne M. Bianchi, PhD
Professor of Sociology
Department of Sociology
University of Maryland

Title and Description: “What Gives” When Mothers Are Employed?

If the increase in maternal employment had been the only change in the family in the past few decades, mothers’ time with children would have decreased significantly. Yet mothers’ average time with children was as high in 1998 as in 1965. The presentation will review forces that keep investments in childrearing high even among employed mothers, such as the changing selection into/timing of parenthood; changing norms about what children “need” from parents; and increased fear for children’s safety, especially in urban environments. Then, using recently collected time diary data, the presentation will focus on the trends and differentials in maternal time with children by mothers’ employment status. I pose and try to answer three questions: 1) How large are differences in time with children between employed and nonemployed mothers? 2) What, in addition to time with children, does market work seem to “crowd out” of mothers’ days? Are the activities that get squeezed consistent with the idea that employed mothers go to great lengths to “protect” time with children? 3) If so, are there “subjective costs” to trying to “do it all?” That is, are there differences in subjective assessments of time pressures and the quality/adequacy of time with children and spouse between employed and non-employed mothers?

Ann Crouter, PhD
Professor of Human Development and Director,
Center for Work and Family Research
The Pennsylvania State University

And

Ben Goodman
Graduate Student
Department of Human Development and Family Studies
The Pennsylvania State University

Title and Description: Fathers’ Work Conditions: Implications for the Quality of Father-Child Relationships

Compared to the literature on maternal employment and mothers’ work circumstances, much less is known about how fathers’ work is related to their behavior as parents and to the quality of their relationships with their children. In this presentation, we identify paternal occupational conditions that are associated with the quality of father-child relationships, drawing upon several ongoing, longitudinal studies that focus on the work-family interface during the childrearing years. We will provide illustrations that highlight different strategies for learning about the work-family interface for fathers. These strategies include person-oriented approaches (e.g., creating typologies of fathers who share multi-faceted work or parenting profiles) and variable-oriented approaches that examine work or family phenomena one at a time. Although the focus of the presentation will be on fathers, not mothers, we will review some evidence that suggests that the links between occupational conditions and parenting may be stronger for fathers than for mothers and make the argument that this reflects the less scripted nature of the father role.

E. Jeffrey Hill, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
School of Family Life
Brigham Young University

and

Giuseppe Martinengo
Doctoral Student
School of Family Life
Brigham Young University

Title and Description: Work-family facilitation: What does it look like?

Research on the interface between families and work often focuses on work-family conflict. However, the concept of facilitation is gaining a place on the work-family map and is defined as, “the extent to which participation at work (or home) is made easier by virtue of the experiences, skills, and opportunities gained or developed at home (or work).” The purpose of this study is to identify specific ways that employees report that family and work positively affect one another, and then to categorize these into salient themes of work-family facilitation. The source for the data in this study is the IBM 2004 Global Work and Life Issues Survey. The sample for this survey was drawn from 79 countries and stratified by country and by gender. Altogether 97,644 employees (31% of the IBM population) were invited to participate and 41,769 responded, for a participation rate of 43%. The questionnaire was translated into 12 different languages and there were more than 100 questions. This is the largest known single-issue, work-life survey administered by any corporate, governmental, or academic entity. The two open-ended questions that we content-coded for this study were: (1) What are some specific ways that your work at IBM positively affects your home life?, and (2) What are some specific ways your home life positively affects your work at IBM? Substantive and methodological findings and implications from this study will be presented.

Maureen Perry-Jenkins, PhD
Associate Professor of Psychology
University of Massachusetts
And graduate students:
Amy Claxton, Julianna Smith, & Mark Manning

Title and Description: Work and Marriage: Bi-directional Relationships between Job Conditions and Marital Quality

Increasingly, over the past three decades, pressures associated with parental employment, work conditions, work schedules, and child care have become growing concerns of new parents, due to the sharp rise in women's employment rates. (Bachu & O'Connell, 2000). Despite the fact that the majority of new mothers return to paid employment within 6 months of their child's birth, the transition to parenthood literature has paid little attention to the effects of this second transition back to work on the marital relationships of new parents. In addition, we know even less about how social class may moderate the ways in which work and marriage are related. Finally, despite recognition of the bidirectional relationships between work and family, far more research has focused on how work affects marriage as opposed to the influences of marriage on the experiences of work. The goal of this presentation is to examine the bi-directional linkages between work conditions and marital quality across the first year of the transition to parenthood. Data for this project will come from a longitudinal study of 153 working-class, dual-earner couples who were interviewed at five separate time points across the first year of parenthood.

Shelley M. MacDermid, PhD
Professor
Director, Center for Families at Purdue University
And
Co-Director
Military Family Research Institute at Purdue University
Purdue University

Title and Description:  Flexibility and Control: Does One Necessarily Bring the Other?

Flexibility in work schedules or locations is frequently promoted as the least costly and most effective way to make it easier for workers to succeed at home and at work. A corollary assumption is that flexibility brings control over work or vice versa, but in practice this may not always be true. For example, academics have great flexibility but often little control due to the pressure of long work hours. Other occupations may bring considerable control or power (e.g., physicians or judges), but little flexibility because of the demands of client service. In this chapter we will explore the definitions and meaning of flexibility and control at work, examine their overlap and uniqueness, and consider their relevance for workers with different characteristics.

Ruth M. Milkman, PhD
Professor
Department of Sociology
UCLA

Title and Description:   Family Leave and Workforce Inequality

This paper focuses on the linkage between the availability of wage replacement for workers who take leaves from their jobs to care for a new child or a seriously ill family member, on the one hand, and the growth of economic inequality in the workforce, on the other.  In precisely the same period (roughly, the past three decades) that the labor force participation of mothers has increased, the U.S. has experienced substantial growth in wage and income inequality.  Moreover, better-paid managerial and professional workers are far more likely than their poorly paid counterparts in other kinds of jobs to have access to employer-provided paid time off (paid sick leave, paid vacation, etc.) which are often used to provide income support for family leaves.  The federal Family and Medical Leave Act, passed in 1993, has done little to address this problem since the leaves it guarantees are (a) unpaid and (b) cover less than half of the workforce.  California's new paid family leave program, the first in the U.S., which took full effect in mid-2004, has the potential to address this issue more adequately.  This paper and presentation will review previous research on these issues and also present data on the impact of the new California program.

Richard B. Miller, PhD
Professor, School of Family Life
Brigham Young University

Title and Description: The Interaction between Marital Relationships and Retirement

Retirement can have a significant impact on the relationship between husbands and wives. After decades of spending much of the day working in different spheres, spouses must adjust to increased time together. In addition, they must negotiate how they will spend their additional leisure time. How successfully do couples navigate these changes in their relationship? What are the pitfalls and challenges that couples experience during this transition? This presentation will explore answers to these questions, as well as examine the influence that marital relationships have on the timing of retirement and retirement satisfaction.

Phyllis Moen, PhD
McKnight Presidential Chair, Sociology
University of Minnesota

Title and Description: Uncertain Futures in Middle-Class Families: Changing Jobs, Leaving Work

The use of the career concept is heavily gendered, typically reflecting men’s, not women’s experiences. Thus, “career” commonly refers to moving through a series of (related) jobs over the life course, historically typical only of mostly white, mostly middle-class men. Still the career mystique that developed in the middle of the 20th century promised both work and family success and security, as breadwinners followed organizational careers (moving up internal ladders within a corporation), or occupational careers: (moving up internal ladders within professions). When women are the focus, the career concept is typically constrained to a narrower definition, referring to their remaining in, or moving in and out of, the labor force. This view of careers presumes a segmented (primary and secondary) labor market, with people in “good” jobs (with career ladders) bolstered by both full-time homemakers and a secondary sector of persons drifting between jobs or else providing administrative support. The pervasive gender bias in the conceptualization of careers is also reflected in an exclusive emphasis on the individual as the unit of analysis. Workers are defined as individuals without family responsibilities or constraints, and their careers are similarly defined as reflecting individuals’ mobility patterns. But times have changed, and most middle-class families are now dual-earner families. The economy has changed as well; American workers now must compete in a global labor market, where corporate mergers, downsizing, and bankruptcies are commonplace. In this paper we chart the actual experiences of members of the new middle-class workforce in dual–earner households, drawing on data from the Ecology of Careers panel study of couples. We focus on 1) the dynamics of men’s and women’s job changes over a two-year period, assessing the degree to which men and women working for the same employers remain in or leave their jobs; 2) the dynamics of couples’ job changes—whether husbands and wives experience similar shifts, or whether one spouse’s job stability compensates for or facilitates their partners’ job change; 3) whether assessments of husbands’ and wives’ career priority predict job shifts; 4) whether the reasons for job turnover vary by age and family life stage; and 5) whether job stability or job shifts alter the quality of family life of either or both spouses.

Rena Repetti
Department of Psychology
UCLA

Title: Families Reuniting After Work

Reunions at the end of the work and school day are a key moment in a family's day; they are the juncture from the public life of work and school to the private life of the family. I will discuss two approaches that I have taken in my research to study these daily reunions. One is a hypothesis-testing approach to address questions about how stressful experiences at work may shape patterns of family interaction after work. One of the key findings from this line of research is that stressful days at work are often followed by the employed family member's withdrawal from social interaction. The second is a descriptive approach, in which video data from a naturalistic study of families are used to examine how parents are welcomed home by children and spouses. This study, which is conducted through the Center for the Everyday Lives of Families at UCLA, provides an intensive look at a week in the life of 32 families. Our analyses indicate that mothers are generally welcomed home by husbands and children with positive attention, such as being greeted with affection or with a warm and attentive acknowledgement. Fathers are less likely to be welcomed home with positive attention, and their children are often distracted and non-attentive when reunited with fathers. Fathers are more likely to be ignored or treated as a secondary concern or a "side involvement" by their children, who are often engaged in an activity from which they do not appear willing to break their attention. The advantages to using different kinds of research designs, which offer different types of information and insights into the connections between work and family life, will be discussed.

Christopher J. Ruhm, PhD
Jefferson-Pilot Excellence Professor of Economics
Bryan School of Business and Economics
University of North Carolina-Greensborough

Title and Description: “Maternal Employment and Child Outcomes”

This paper will summarize recent work by myself and others examining how maternal employment affects child outcomes. I will first review the recent literature examining how labor supply during the first years of the child’s life affects cognitive and socioemotional outcomes around the time of school entry. This will be followed by a discussion of the more limited research available examining the health, cognitive, and developmental outcomes for adolescents. Attention will be paid to alternative approaches to correcting for nonrandom selection into employment, issues related to the specification of maternal employment, as well as econometric issues and problems faced by researchers studying these questions.

Graeme Russell, PhD
Associate Professor
Department of Psychology
Division of Linguistics and Psychology
Macquarie University
Australia

Title and Description: Living through Work; Working through Life

The focus in this paper is on the current and expected future issues associated with enabling both women and men to meet their employment (e.g., career) and caring aspirations (e.g., to have children) and responsibilities. It takes a life span perspective – both in terms of the pathways for individuals and in terms of issues for different cohorts of carers (e.g., those who have their children in their mid to late thirties, those who have elderly parents when they have retired, grandparents). Caring is defined broadly to include: children (at all ages), disability, elderly, partners (where intimacy is included as part of caring), and self. The paper is based on an analysis of available research data, and it takes account both of employment and demographic trends, and options for change (e.g., for work redesign to enable different patterns of work and care)