Work, Family, Health, and Well-Being

Suzanne M. Bianchi, Lynne M. Casper, Rosalind Berkow King

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781135605865
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Work, Family, Health, and Well-Being grew out of a conference held in Washington, D.C. in June 2003 on "Workforce/Workplace Mismatch: Work, Family, Health, and Well-Being" sponsored by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The text considers multiple dimensions of health and well-being for workers and their families, children, and communities. Investigations into the socioeconomic gradient in health within broad occupational categories have raised important questions about the role of specific working conditions versus the role of conditions of employment such as wages and level of job security afforded a worker and his/her family in affecting health outcomes.Organized into seven parts, this text:
*provides an overview of changes in work and family time and time use;
*dedicates a section focusing specifically on employers and workplaces;
*explores disciplinary perspectives on work, family, health, and well-being;
*focuses on the most studied work and family nexus, the interrelationship between parental employment, especially maternal employment and the child's well-being;
*examines gender differences in the division of labor, the effect of marriage on health, the shifting nature of care-giving throughout life, and the role of work on various health and well-being outcomes;
*explores occupational health literature; and
*focuses on the unique work-family issues faced by low-income families and workers in low-wage jobs.This book appeals to anyone in the fields of psychology, sociology, family studies, demographics, economics, anthropology, and social work.

1
Complex Connections: A Multidisciplinary Look at Work, Family, Health, and Well-Being Research

Suzanne M.Bianchi
University of Maryland,

Lynne M.Casper
National Institute of Child Health and Human Development

Rosalind Berkowitz King
National Institute of Child Health and Human Development

One cannot turn on the radio, pick up the newspaper, or sit before a TV news program, sitcom, or drama without soon being reminded of the frenetic pace of life and the constant challenges individuals face in allocating sufficient time to work and family life. Work and family constitute the two most important domains of adulthood. As Rosabeth Kanter (1977) reminded us three decades ago, despite the myth of the separate spheres of work and family, there are myriad ways in which work spills over and affects family life and vice versa. Occupations differ in the level of absorption—or commitment—they require on the part of the person who fills them. Some occupations require the unpaid assistance and cooperation of family members. Work hours, shifts, and schedules tend to define the pace of family life and determine when family members can all be together. Work provides the income for the consumption that determines families’ standard of living and the opportunities they can afford their members. Income can be variable, with some jobs providing access to security and high levels of economic well-being, whereas other jobs do not pay a living wage, are temporary, or do not come with steady, predictable hours. The nature of work—including work “cultures”—affects workers’ physical health and social and psychological well-being. How successfully people organize their work lives can directly affect their health and well-being. Through the effects of workplaces on workers, job characteristics and work cultures can then spill over to affect the health and well-being of children and other family members as well as the communities in which workers live.

Yet family life also affects work. During periods of particularly intense family demands, such as after the birth of a child or during the illness of a family member, workers try to “scale back” their commitment to long workhours. They may have increased absences from work, and the quality and quantity of their output may slip. Increased home demands can also affect workers’ physical health and social and psychological well-being. Thus, increasing family demands can affect employer well-being, along with the well-being of workers and their families, both directly and indirectly through feedback loops,

The effects of work and family life on health and well-being vary by gender and race/ethnicity. Women continue to shoulder a disproportionate amount of the burden of housework and child care even as their responsibilities in the labor market increase. A gender gap in wages persists for all but select sectors of the labor force, and women incur a wage penalty for motherhood that continues for years after childbirth (Budig & England, 2001). Non-White workers disproportionately occupy jobs with lower pay, fewer benefits, and less flexible working conditions. At the same time, minorities have larger families and thus greater levels of family responsibility. African-American women, in particular, spend less of their lifetimes within marriage than White women while having slightly higher fertility rates (Raley, 2000); thus, they tend to be particularly vulnerable as sole wage earners with multiple dependents. Health disparities exist in such areas as overall ratings of health, coronary heart disease, and hypertension, with African-American women generally fairing the worst. Given these striking differences in work, family, and health across race/ethnicity and gender, it is imperative to examine how they are all interrelated.

This volume considers multiple dimensions of health and well-being for workers, their families, their children, and their communities. For individuals, health includes physiological outcomes such as mortality, hypertension, diabetes, and lung cancer, as well as depression and other mental disorders. It also includes economic and social well-being. Research in the fields of occupational and public health has demonstrated that the settings for and activities engaged in during work hours have consequences for disease, injury, and disability among workers. Traditionally, occupational health researchers have focused on exposure to chemicals and the physical conditions under which labor is performed. As the nature and content of work has changed, the focus of research has shifted to the relationships between the psychosocial dimensions of work and worker health outcomes, including mental disorders and unhealthy habits. The health of the individual worker is intimately related to the health of the worker’s family. Epidemiological investigations into the socioeconomic gradient in health within broad occupational categories have raised important questions about the role of specific psychosocial working conditions versus the role of conditions of employment, such as wages and level of job security afforded a worker and his or her family, in affecting health outcomes.

Social science research shows that work and family behaviors (e.g., how much time one devotes to work and family domains, how well work schedules interweave with family routines, and whether work and family experiences arepositive or negative) affect not only physical and mental health, but also social and economic well-being. For families, work and family behaviors, the nature of the work being done, and the workplace environment can affect the health and well-being of spouses, children, and other family members, and how well the family functions. Stressful home conditions resulting from competing work and family demands, unfavorable work conditions, or the ill health of a parent can affect children’s cognitive, social, and emotional development. For communities, work and family behaviors can cause adverse consequences by transferring more responsibilities to neighbors, schools, and community organizations. In addition, healthy individuals and families are the building blocks of healthy functioning communities.

Although research in work, family, health, and well-being spans many disciplines, researchers have typically used theories, methods, key concepts, and constructs from a single disciplinary perspective, limiting the types of questions they ask and the utility of the answers they provide. For example, labor economists and sociologists who study occupations tend to focus mainly on work and working conditions, family demographers focus mainly on family structure and behaviors, anthropologists study work culture and the everyday activities of individuals, occupational physicians focus on occupational health problems, psychologists focus on stress and mental health of the individual as they relate to either work or family, and management researchers assess the organization of work and production. As illustrated, these factors are all interrelated and need to be studied concurrently, applying a multidisciplinary approach. The first step in implementing a broader, more integrated approach, and the goal of this volume, is to bring together research that examines work, family, health, and well-being linkages from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. The volume draws together research exploring many dimensions of work and family life to assess the state of scientific knowledge and to provide directions for new areas of investigation.

The volume is organized into seven major sections: The first section provides an overview of changes in work and family time and time use, followed by a section focused on employers and workplaces. Next, the volume explores disciplinary perspectives on work, family, health, and well-being. This is followed by a section focused on the most studied work and family nexus, the interrelationship between parental employment, especially maternal employment, and child well-being. However, child well-being is but one important topic area in work and family research, and the remaining sections focus on additional family, work, and well-being interrelationships. A fifth section provides an examination of gender differences in the division of labor, the effect of marriage on health, the shifting nature of caregiving throughout life, and the role of work on various health and well-being outcomes. Next, the occupational health literature is explored. In the final section, the focus turns to the unique work-family issues faced by low-income families and workers in low-wage jobs. We now turn to a brief summary of the contents of the chapters in each section.

PART I: TIME, WORK, AND FAMILY

A unifying theme in the study of work and family change is the issue of time: time as a finite resource—time that may become increasingly scarce as families try to balance multiple work schedules with multiple family and life demands. Most work in this area has been done by sociologists and demographers. However, developmental psychologists have examined how time allocation affects children’s outcomes. The chapters in this section form a unified whole, with each chapter discussing a different piece of the timeallocation issue in families. The purpose of this section is to paint a picture of the complexities involved in fulfilling the demands of work and family life given the limits of a 24-hour day and a 201.9% week. Collectively, these chapters address one of the most important issues to consider in examining how work and family lives affect the health and well-being of workers and their families: time allocation.

In chapter 2, Suzanne M.Bianchi and Sara B.Raley describe the dilemma families face in deciding how to allocate time between market work and the home so that family members have the financial, emotional, and social resources they need to thrive and prosper. The authors trace how families have adapted over time to meet competing obligations, with women shedding time in housework and protecting time with children, as they add time in the labor force, and men increasing the time they spend doing housework and child care. They provide an intriguing picture of total (paid plus unpaid) work hours in married couple families, which suggests that fathers and mothers share workloads relatively equally and that workloads have increased for both parents. Yet gender specialization has not disappeared, with women devoting proportionately more of their total hours to housework and child care and men devoting far more of their time to market work.

Like Bianchi and Raley, Harriet B.Presser (chap. 3) is concerned with time in market activities, but her chapter goes beyond the number of hours worked per week and considers the time of day and days of the week on which this work occurs and the effects these schedules have on the health and well-being of workers. She points out that the consequences for family functioning are likely to depend on which hours and which days individuals work and which hours and which days their family members work. For example, working late at night or on a rotating shift appears to be more detrimental for individuals and their families than working on weekends. Additionally, evening work reduces the time parents spend with children, whereas night work may increase marital instability. Presser concludes by pointing out that the biggest growth in the economy is projected to be in service occupations, which have high levels of nonstandard work hours and shifts.

In chapter 4, Ann C.Crouter and Susan M.McHale acknowledge that the complexity of work time within and across families is important for family functioning and extend this notion to the study of children’s outcomes. They argue that it is necessary to examine additional dimensions of time to understand how work and family considerations affect children. The chapter reviews the associations among parental work hours, schedules and shifts, the rhythms of family routines and family time, children’s time use, and children’s relationships, developmental outcomes, and psychosocial well-being. The research suggests that mothers’ work hours are more weakly associated with child outcomes than fathers’ work hours and that shift work scheduling can be problematic for children. Family time and family rituals are positively related to children’s psychosocial functioning. Children’s involvement in structured activities is associated with fewer behavior problems. The authors conclude that, although each of these time dimensions is important for children and youth outcomes, researchers have not adequately studied the interrelations among the different time dimensions and have not mapped the causal processes by which they affect child outcomes.

Finally, in chapter 5, Barbara Schneider and Linda Waite continue the focus on the dilemma of time allocation within families and how time allocation affects individuals and family members. They argue that it is important not only to know how people spend time throughout the day, but also how they “feel about it”—how they subjectively experience their activities. For example, what is it about long work hours that increases stress? Is it the number of work hours per se or is it how people feel about the type of activity they are doing or the coworkers with whom they are engaged when they work those long hours? The authors introduce the reader to the Experience Sampling Method (ESM) that can be used to collect the subjective information necessary to answer these questions. They also argue that, under certain circumstances, the ESM can provide better quality time use data than surveys or time diaries.

PART II: THE “WORK” IN WORK AND FAMILY

The second section of the volume focuses on the employer side of the work and family relationship, charting how workplaces have changed and how employers think about their responsibilities for meeting workers’ family needs. Employers, consultants working with employers on workplace policies, and employees often see academic research in the work-family area—particularly studies that rely on secondary data analysis—as unrealistic in their assumptions and expectations. Employers have interests that do not always match those of employees, and organizational change can be difficult to accomplish especially in a short period of time. The chapters in this section seek to begin to bridge this gap between academic research and practices in work settings to make research in this area more applicable to real-world settings. Collectively, the authors bring perspectives from schools of business, social demography, economics, labor and industrial relations, management sciences, and public policy.

Beginning with the Holzer chapter and proceeding through each of the other chapters in turn, this section widens our perspective from a narrow, ground-level lens to a consideration of both broader and higher level contexts. All of the authors accept the health of the organization as a legitimate consideration. However, as the reader proceeds through the section, the primacy of that consideration is questioned on grounds that are relevant to employers, including productivity and community reputation.

In chapter 6, Harry J.Holzer presents an accessible discussion of the decision-making framework of employers with regard to work-family issues, laying out supply and demand processes. Holzer considers the factors that determine employers’ choices about hiring, benefits, and workplace flexibility. He asks whether the mix of employer policies generated by the labor market is optimal from the point of view of workers, society, and employers. He argues that employers have an interest in assisting families in balancing work and family. By helping employees to manage the conflict between work and family, and subsequently minimizing the difficulties raised by absenteeism and turnover that are frequently associated with child care and increasingly elder care problems, employers can create a more stable and productive labor force. Employer size, industry, type of production, and target labor pool influence the level of workplace flexibility and family-related benefits offered. However, the labor market does not always distribute these benefits across workers equally. Holzer briefly considers the role of public policy advocating government mandates, tax subsidies, or credits as ways to correct for the inequitable distribution of benefits across workplaces.

Ellen Ernst Kossek (chap. 7) extends Holzer’s economic viewpoint by reviewing the research on employer work-family policies and discussing the gaps in the literature. She identifies three types of studies on work-family policy: those that focus on how and whether policies are adopted, those that focus on who uses the policies (a demographic view), and those that focus on the effects of work-family policies on employees and employers. She then discusses the need to look at the different types of policies, the way they are implemented, whether employers support the policies, how individual supervisors and work groups affect the enactment of policies, how policies can be integrated into human resource strategies, and the difficulties with the “business case,” which she argues overemphasizes the role of the shareholder in cost-benefit analyses.

In chapter 8, Cynthia A.Thompson, Jeanine K.Andreassi, and David J. Prottas build on Kossek’s chapter and move further from the straightforward economic argument to a focus on workplace culture. First, the authors review the literature, noting that work-family culture is comprised of three parts: organizational time demands, career consequences for using work-family benefits, and managerial support. Research shows that a supportive work-family culture is related to a greater use of work-family policies. Extreme time demands have adverse effects on employees’ health and well-being. In addition, these demands have implications for employees’ use of family-friendly policies. A supportive relationship between employees and their manager has been shown to be a powerful predictor of use of work-family policies, greater work-family balance, and higher overall satisfaction with work. The authors also consider the antecedents to an unfriendly work culture and show that culture can vary across subunits of the same organization.

Lotte Bailyn, in chapter 9, shifts our perspective on the design and construction of the workplace in terms of both structures and mind-sets. She makes explicit the perspective in which the three previous chapters are grounded—that the organization is a given and workers’ lives need to be adapted to it. She then discusses the implications of legitimating the workers’ needs and placing that consideration above that of the already recognized legiti...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• 1 Complex Connections: A Multidisciplinary Look at Work, Family, Health, and Well-Being Research
• Part I Time, Work, and Family
• Part II The “Work” in Work and Family
• Part III Disciplinary Perspectives in the Study of Work and Family
• Part IV Parental Employment and Outcomes for Children
• Part V Gender and Empoyment, Caregiving and Health
• Part VI Occupations, Workplace Settings, and Health of Families
• Part VII Low-Income Families and Work, Care, Health, and Well-Being
• Part VIII Conclusion
• About the Contributors
• Author Index
• Author Index