An examination of the literature on conflict between work and family roles suggests that work-family conflict exists when: (a) time devoted to the requirements of one role makes it difficult to fulfill requirements of another; (b) strain from participation in one role makes it difficult to fulfill requirements of another; and (c) specific behaviors required by one role make it difficult to fulfill the requirements of another. A model of work-family conflict is proposed, and a series of research propositions is presented.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/258214.pdf

Sources of Conflict Between Work and Family Roles

For a variety of sociopolitical, economic, scientific, and clinical reasons, considerable interest in the study of father-child relationships has emerged in the last decade. In the last few years, the focus has narrowed to concern about the effects of increased paternal involvement. Interest in, and concern about, the latter seems to be especially prominent among social service providers and clinicians. For this reason, and also because the voluminous literature on paternal influences has been scrutinized quite extensively, we will focus in this chapter on evidence concerning the effects of increased involvement. Much less will be said, mostly in summary fashion, about paternal influences more generally, although readers will be referred to recent reviews for further discussions of the literature.

The Role of the Father in Child Development

We focus on everyday role transitions involving home, work, and other places. Transitions are boundary-crossing activities, where one exits and enters roles by surmounting role boundaries. Roles can be arrayed on a continuum, spanning high segmentation to high integration. Segmentation decreases role blurring but increases the magnitude of change, rendering boundary crossing more difficult; crossing often is facilitated by rites of passage. Integration decreases the magnitude of change but increases blurring, rendering boundary creation and maintenance more difficult; this challenge often is surmounted by boundary work.

All in a Day'S Work: Boundaries and Micro Role Transitions

Work and family research in IO/OB: Content analysis and review of the literature (1980–2002)

A meta-analytic review of work–family conflict and its antecedents ☆

The study of work and the study of the family have traditionally constituted separate sub-disciplines in sociology. Rapoport and Rapoport (1965) and Kanter (1976), among others, have aptly stressed the need for greater examination of work and family roles in relation to each other. Such joint consideration is necessary to describe how individuals' functioning in either of these spheres is affected by their involvement in the other. Further, the current examination of sex roles brings added impetus to the analysis of work-family interrelationships. A major part of what is usually meant by change in "sex roles" is specifically change in the traditional allocation of work and family roles between men and women. Traditional sex role norms prescribed the specialization of work and family responsibilities by sex, but a new option for each sex to integrate roles in both work and the family is now emerging. This paper analyzes some aspects of what I term the "work-family role system." The work-family role system is composed of the male work role, the female work role, the female family role, and the male family role. Each of these roles may be fully actualized, or may be only partly actualized or latent, as is often the case with the female work role and the male family role. The analysis of these four roles as a system provides a useful way of organizing research about the relations among these roles, and suggests new relations to be examined. It also makes possible some inferences about the dynamics of future changes in women's and men's roles in work and the family. Analyzing men's and women's work and family roles as components of a role system involves specifying how each role articulates with the others to which it is linked, and how variations in the nature of each role, or whether the role is actualized at all, affects the others. For example, to describe the link between the female work and the female family roles, we consider how the extent of the female work role (ranging from no paid work at all, to the most demanding and highest status full time work) both affects and is affected by the extent of the female family role. These links can be considered at two conceptual levels. They can be analyzed at the level of the individual couple, e.g., the relation between wives' employment status and wives' role performance in the family. Each link can also be considered at the

The work-family role system.

The effects of wives' employment status on wives' and husbands' evaluations of their own marital adjustment are examined in two recent national surveys. Working wives whose husbands also work report having wished they had married someone else and having thought of divorce significantly more often than housewives, but do not score significantly lower on ratings of marital satisfaction or marital happiness, or on four other specific components of marital adjustment. Wives' employment status does not significantly affect husbands' reports of marital adjustment. The negative effects of wives' employment on wives' reports of marital adjustment are then found to be restricted specifically to mothers of preschool children, and to wives with less than a high school diploma. No empirical support emerges for two major hypotheses to account for the negative effects of wives' employment on wives' marital adjustment in these two subgroups, one hypothesis concerning wives' role load and the second concerning wives' and...

Wives' Employment Status and Marital Adjustment: Yet Another Look

Responses to four items concerning perceptions of women workers, the fulfillment the family role gives women, discrimination against women, and attitude towards women's liberation are analyzed in r...

Joseph H. Pleck

Papers

The work-family role system.

Wives' Employment Status and Marital Adjustment: Yet Another Look

Men's traditional perceptions and attitudes about women: correlates of adjustment or maladjustment