Forty decades of sociological stress research offer five major findings. First, when stressors (negative events, chronic strains, and traumas) are measured comprehensively, their damaging impacts on physical and mental health are substantial. Second, differential exposure to stressful experiences is a primary way that gender, racial-ethnic, marital status, and social class inequalities in physical and mental health are produced. Third, minority group members are additionally harmed by discrimination stress. Fourth, stressors proliferate over the life course and across generations, widening health gaps between advantaged and disadvantaged group members. Fifth, the impacts of stressors on health and well-being are reduced when persons have high levels of mastery, self-esteem, and/or social support. With respect to policy, to help individuals cope with adversity, tried and true coping and support interventions should be more widely disseminated and employed. To address health inequalities, the structural conditions that put people at risk of stressors should be a focus of programs and policies at macro and meso levels of intervention. Programs and policies also should target children who are at lifetime risk of ill health and distress due to exposure to poverty and stressful family circumstances.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0022146510383499

Stress and Health: Major Findings and Policy Implications

Differences among generations on a wide variety of outcomes are of increasing interest to organizations, practitioners, and researchers alike. The goal of this study was to quantitatively assess the research on generational differences in work-related attitudes and to provide guidance for future research and practice. We conducted a meta-analysis of generational differences on three work-related criteria: job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and intent to turnover. Our review of published and unpublished research found 20 studies allowing for 18 generational pairwise comparisons across four generations (Traditionals, Baby Boomers, Generation Xers, and Millennials) on these outcomes using 19,961 total subjects. Corrected mean differences for job satisfaction ranged from .02 to .25, for organizational commitment they ranged from −.22 to .46, and for intent to turnover the range was −.62 to .05. The pattern of results indicates that the relationships between generational membership and work-related outcomes are moderate to small, essentially zero in many cases. The findings suggest that meaningful differences among generations probably do not exist on the work-related variables we examined and that the differences that appear to exist are likely attributable to factors other than generational membership. Given these results, targeted organizational interventions addressing generational differences may not be effective. This is the first known quantitative review of research on generational differences in the workplace.

Generational differences in work-related attitudes: A meta-analysis.

This study reviewed methodological choices (sampling frames, constructs investigated and measures used) in 245 empirical work-life balance papers published in a range of discipline-based peer-reviewed journals between 1987 and 2006. Results show that work-life balance studies need to establish greater consistency between the conceptualization of constructs and the operationalization of measures. There is also scope for well-designed field experiments to establish clear causal relationships between variables. Sampling choice in previous literature is somewhat constrained and may be enhanced by targeting single and same-sex parent families, manual and lower-skilled service workers, and employees providing eldercare. Researchers should also be more transparent in providing rationales for their choices of organizations or group lists used to target respondents. The findings have significant implications for understanding, interpreting, and utilizing the contemporary work and family literature.

/pdf/methodological-choices-in-work-life-balance-research-1987-to-53m5mc4mq1.pdf

Methodological choices in work-life balance research 1987 to 2006: a critical review

Guided by the role strain and the role enhancement theories, this study examined the effect of caregivers' multiple roles, such as being employed and taking care of minors in their household, on their psychological adjustment. Of the caregivers who completed the American Cancer Society's Quality of Life Survey for Caregivers, 457 caregivers who were middle-aged (18-64) and provided complete data for the study variables were included in the analyses. The indicators of the outcome variables, namely, the levels of the caregivers' psychological adjustment, were cancer caregiving stress, management of meaning out of providing care, and negative and positive affect. Multivariate general linear modeling analyses revealed that employed caregivers who were also taking care of children reported higher levels of caregiving stress and negative affect. In contrast, employed caregivers who were not taking care of children reported greater levels of managing meaning of caregiving experience. The findings provide partial support for the role strain theory, that the more social roles a caregiver carries out, the more likely the caregiver is to experience stress and negative affect. The findings also suggest that when providing care for cancer survivors, caregivers may benefit from being employed. These findings have significant implications for developing targeted programs to reduce the psychological distress of cancer caregivers with multiple roles and to assist them in recognizing their caregiving experience as meaningful.

Psychological adjustment of cancer caregivers with multiple roles.

Work–family conflict and enrichment are experiences that occur daily and have substantial consequences for employees, their families, and the organizations that employ them. The aim of the current review is to make a link between life and career stage, work and family conditions, and the work–family interface. The basic proposition is that life stages partly determine career development, and consequently the specific working conditions (job demands and job resources) and family conditions (family demands and family resources) that individuals are exposed to. As a result, the specific demands and resources in the work and family domains determine to what extent individuals experience that work and family are conflicting or enriching life domains. In this review we suggest that individuals in early adulthood will experience high inter-role conflict and low facilitation due to high demands and low resources in both life domains, while individuals in late adulthood will experience the opposite pattern; that is, low conflict and high facilitation due to low demands and high resources in both domains. Individuals in middle adulthood will experience high work–family conflict but also high family–work facilitation due to the presence of high job demands and resources in both life domains. Integrating life and career stage perspectives and the experience of work–family interface is of notable practical utility because it provides a mechanism to make more informed decisions about the relative need for and corresponding benefits of work–family programs

Work–family interface from a life and career stage perspective: The role of demands and resources

Home-to-job spillover, a source of stress for employed men and women, can be exacerbated by factors that deplete personal time and energy. Household responsibilities and caring for children or the elderly are stressors that may differentially impact employed adults based on lifecycle stage. The present study identified time, satisfaction, and demographic variables significantly associated with negative home-to-job spillover for three generational groups: generation Xer’s, boomers, and matures. Matures spent significantly more time caring for the elderly whereas boomers and generation Xer’s spent more time caring for children. Significantly more boomers reported home-to-job spillover, and there were more predictors of spillover for this group than for members of the younger or older generations.

Nancy Kingsbury

Papers

Home-to-job spillover for generation X, boomers, and matures : A comparison