Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: We use role theory to direct our analysis of the association between family-friendly policies, family role quality, and positive spillover from family to the workplace. Taking data from 104 dual-earner couples with children, we find that a supportive workplace culture is both directly and indirectly associated with positive family-to-work spillover for men and women. Whereas family role quality and positive spillover are mainly associated with time factors for a wife’s job, workplace environment and pressure are important facets of a husband’s job. We also find that women’s experience of positive spillover is associated with her partner’s ability to take care of sick children when the need arises. These findings can be viewed through the lens of gender theory and may be representative of traditionally structured institutions and roles.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper examines the work-family interface for married men and women in Korea. Using data from 363 Korean civil servants, the study explores the mechanism of family-to-work facilitation---how resources from family moderate the job stress-job satisfaction relationship at the workplace. Although the individualistic Western work-family literature predicts that resources transferred from the family role, both instrumental and affective, will facilitate the work role by mitigating the negative job stress-job satisfaction relationship, regression analyses with the data from the collectivistic Korean society show an opposite effect---an accentuating, not a mitigating moderating effect. That is, the negative job stress-job satisfaction relationship is stronger, not weaker, when family resource transfer is high than when family resource transfer is low. This finding indicates that family resource transfer---especially affective transfer---may function as an additional work stressor rather than a facilitator at the workplace under collectivists’ weak role identity separation between work and family roles. The study thus reveals the cultural biases in the extant Western work-family literature by showing that the cultural variance in role identity separation/integration may underlie the mechanism of family-to-work facilitation.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Recent the family meal has received attention as a partial solution to pathologies from deliquency to obesity in children. At the same time, it has been observed that family meals are threatened by parental work schedules. This study examines the impact of parents' work experieneces (non-standard work schedules; non-set work schedules; work stress; etc.) on family meal rituals. Data are taken from the "Parental Time, Role Strains, Coping, and Children's Diet and Nutrition" project conducted on 312 families. Mothers, fathers, and one child were interviewed from each family.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: We compare the ways in which the location of work is both a product of an individual’s constraints or incentives to be mobile (such as life stage, family stage, and human capital) and an influence on family functioning, for residents of the United States and Germany. We pose three main questions: what kinds of workers are most likely to work at home in each country, which workers have worksites that vary, and which have fixed commutes? What consequences for family life do these different work locations have? And are there nation-specific contextual differences? We use data from a representative study on spatial job-related mobility that will be collected in Germany in April 2007, funded by the European Commission’s Job Mobility and Family Lives in Europe Project and from a representative study of couples in communities in Upstate New York funded by the Sloan Foundation.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: How does the combined working time of dual-earner couples affect the work-family conflict of men and women in these relationships? Does this effect vary by family life stage? This study draws on data from the 1997 National Study of the Changing Workforce to answer these questions. I find that work-family conflict increases among men and women as the couple’s joint hours of paid labor rises. Furthermore, women, but not men, are affected by the ratio of their own employment hours to those of their husbands. Finally, parents report significantly higher levels of work-family conflict than do non-parents; I find some evidence that this effect varies by the age of the youngest child in the home. Future research using couples as the unit of analysis and longitudinally examining families over the life course is suggested.