Thesis (Ed. D.)--West Virginia University, 2002. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains vii, 76 p. : ill. Vita. Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 62-69).

For many young women, the transition from late childhood to early adulthood is a challenging time (Arnett, 2000). It is a time spent exploring different career opportunities and relationships and considering future family aspirations. Thinking about one’s future work and family can evoke many concerns amongst emerging adults, especially female students who plan to pursue demanding careers. This is a global phenomenon and South African female students are no exception (Bagraim & Harrison, 2013). Anticipated work-family conflict (AWFC) has received some attention amongst researchers due to the potential impact AWFC can have on students’ decision making (Barnett, Gareis, James, & Steele, 2003; Coyle, Van Leer, Schroeder, & Fulcher, 2015; Michael, Most, & Cinamon, 2011; Westring & Ryan, 2011). Over the past few decades, there has been a global increase in women entering the workforce (Blau & Kahn, 2007; Goldin, 2014). This has resulted in an increase in dual-earner families as both men and women have become co-breadwinners. Despite a shift in shared work responsibilities, many women still feel that taking care of their family is their primary responsibility (Askari, Liss, Erchull, Staebell, & Axelson, 2010). The added pressure that women experience in balancing both work and family domains highlights the importance of better equipping female students with the necessary resources and support as they transition into early adulthood. Not all students experience the same levels of AWFC (Barnett et al., 2003; Coyle et al., 2015). Identifying the key contributors to students’ AWFC has therefore generated a small body of research, which still requires further development. The limited research on students’ perceptions of the work-family interface includes research on several influencing factors, such as gender (e.g. Weer, Greenhaus, Colakoglu, & Foley, 2006); maternal employment (Barnett et al., 2003; Weer et al., 2006), parental education (O'Shea & Kirrane, 2008), self-efficacy to manage future work-family conflict (Cinamon, 2006) and parental role sharing of childcare and housework (Cinamon, 2006). A common thread across the literature is the influence of parents on their children’s perceptions of work and family. Socialisation into the work-family interface begins from early childhood and continues beyond adolescence, with parents shaping their children’s views of work and family life (Levine & Hoffner, 2006; Wiese & Freund, 2011).

Past research has found that work-family conflict is related to trait mindfulness, a unique disposition due to its amenability to change through training. This longitudinal study incorporated a mindfulness-based intervention including a mindfulness-based workshop and behavioral self-monitoring (BSM) in an attempt to reduce work-family conflict in employees. Trait mindfulness was correlated with work-family conflict across time. The intervention increased participants' trait mindfulness and decreased WIF, but did not reduce FIW. There was minimal support for the moderating roles of negative affect and perceived stress on the impact of the intervention. Overall the results provide support for the efficacy of mindfulness-based training as a provision to mitigate WIF. Theoretical and practical implications, as well as future research directions, are also discussed.

Due to the increase in dual-income families, work-family conflict has become a more prevalent phenomenon in today's society. Home healthcare workers have been previously identified as an employment group that is susceptible to high levels of burnout and low levels of job satisfaction, yet work-family conflict concerns have yet to be examined. Particularly because of the great deal of care being provided within a home, both at work and in life, this population is of particular interest for examining work-family conflict. The purpose of this study is to empirically investigate the relationships among work-family conflict, job satisfaction, affectivity, and burnout within a sample of rural, home healthcare employees. More specifically, four distinct models are proposed which include the following variables: positive and negative affectivity, number of hours providing care for others outside of work, number of hours worked per week, family-interference with work conflict, work-interference with family conflict, job satisfaction and three facets of burnout (personal accomplishment, depersonalization, and emotional exhaustion). While models predicting job satisfaction and emotional exhaustion accounted for the most variance, all four models provided information regarding the direct, indirect and mediating relationships of the aforementioned variables. More specifically, the findings suggest that the two types of work-family conflict uniquely mediate the proposed outcome variables highlighting the importance of examining work-family conflict from a more refined perspective. Exploratory group differences are also examined. This study contributes to a gap in the literature examining individuals' experiences of work-family conflict, job satisfaction, and burnout who are employed in a specific career field. Practical, research, and theoretical implications are discussed.

Gender development in Sweden is in the forefront and an increasing number of women choose to work.However, women still have the primary responsibility for home and family even though she and her partnerare working to the same extent. This leads to women, more than men, experience conflict between work andfamily. The conflict arises when then role, time and behavioral demands from one domain interfere orcompete with duties and responsibilities in the other domain. The purpose of the study is to examine femalemanagers' experiences of combining work and family as well as how they try to cope with demands from thetwo domains. I wanted to further explore the coping strategies used to handel the family demandsinterferance withthe work demands. This is a qualitative study and data was collected through semi-structured interviews. The results show that women primarily use problem-focused coping strategiesbytrying to solve the problem, planing and priortizing. Although, the problem-focused strategy to seek help andthe emotion-focused strategies to seek support and to accept the situation were also used.

Guided by an explanatory matrix of family conflict at the end-of-life, the goals of this mixed methods study were to further generate theory regarding family conflict and to provide insights into its correlates and predictors. Sources of data analyzed include quantitative survey responses from 161 hospice family caregivers, 15 in-depth interviews with hospice family caregivers, and 10 interdisciplinary focus groups with hospice professionals. An explanatory matrix is presented that portrays family conflict at the end-of-life as a complex phenomenon influenced by salient contextual variables, conditions, and factors that may contribute to a number of negative outcomes for patients, family members, and professionals. The matrix also provides a beginning understanding of approaches utilized by hospice professionals in their work with families experiencing conflict. Significant bivariate correlations were found between family conflict and family context variables (i.e. prior conflict, length of caregiving, caregiver gender, caregiver age, presence of children in the caregiver’s home, advance planning discussions within family), conditions (i.e. family coming out of the woodwork and patient care needs) and contributing factors (i.e. communication constraints and family asserting control). In the multivariate model, significant predictors of family conflict included prior conflict, caregiver gender, caregiver age, advance planning discussions within family, family coming out of the woodwork, communication constraints, and family asserting control; the model explained 60% of the variance in family conflict. Implications for routine assessment, further examination of interventions to prevent and address conflict, and future research are highlighted. / text

Magister Artium - MA / Rae and her sister, Alina, are young women who have travelled from Australia to visit their aunt, Trudy, in Ireland. Rae’s suspicions that something is amiss with the arrangement are confirmed when they discover that their parents have been arrested for settling in Australia without the appropriate visas. The two young women, who are half Irish, must remain in Ireland until their parents are able to join them. Rae enrols at a university to continue her studies, and Alina finds a job that requires her to move out. Rae is upset with Alina for leaving, and drops out of contact for a while, but then when she does reach out, her messages aren’t returned. Eventually she goes in search of her sister and finds that Alina has left Dublin without saying where she went. Months pass in fruitless searching. Rae settles down at Trinity College, makes friends, and also befriends Joe, a rough sleeper on the Dublin streets. When she discovers that her sister might be in Galway, Rae travels there, accompanied by two friends. Joe offers to aid them. While there, they encounter someone who claims to know Alina, but demands payment before revealing anything. Rae asks Joe – who is familiar with the backstreets – to deliver the cash. Joe is never seen again, and Rae, after some time, finally admits she has been betrayed. One of her two friends decides to explore the clubs and stumbles on Alina who is working there. When Rae approaches her sister, there is a confrontation with the possessive employer, Murphy, who strikes Alina, putting her in hospital. Alina returns to Dublin, and life resumes where it left off, but then Murphy attempts to take Alina back. Rae hurries home and finds Trudy blocking the door to the house with a shotgun which she fires at Murphy’s knee. The demonstration of protectiveness shows Rae how badly she misjudged her aunt. She then discovers that she misjudged Davin, whom she admired from the beginning but incorrectly assumed he was interested in her sister. The novella ends with a recognition of her flawed perceptions which stands in juxtaposition to her confident judgements of people in the opening chapter.

Conflict is an inherent part of human relationships and is ubiquitous within families. These disputes are not in themselves harmful to children. Rather, it is the strategies used to resolve conflict that have a bearing on children’s health and development, notably whether family members employ aggressive or violent tactics. The study examines evidence from a sample of 161 children, selected to be representative of children living in Dublin, Ireland. It explores children’s responses to different methods of conflict resolution in two family relationships and seeks to expand the understanding of how social problems, such as child maltreatment and domestic violence, occur within normative family processes. The study shows that the use of psychological and minor physical aggression to resolve conflict in the parental relationship and the parent-child relationship is typical. It occurs in 90 per cent of families over a twelve-month period. Severe physical force or violence between family members is less common. The study finds that while there is considerable variation in children’s responses to conflict resolution strategies, children who experience aggression in both the inter-parental and parent-child relationship are at elevated risk for behavioural and emotional problems. The frequency and severity of the aggression explains some of the variance in child well-being but not all. The study lends support to Bronfrenbrenner’s (1979) ecological theory by demonstrating empirically how the individual, family, neighbourhood, and potentially societal, contexts moderate the transmission of poor conflict resolution strategies to children's health and development. The findings suggest that while the child's age and gender play a small role, family and neighbourhood contexts are strongly implicated in outcomes for children exposed to risky conflict resolution tactics in the home. In particular, parental mental health problems, low socio-economic status and poor peer relationships increase children’s vulnerability to the effects of aggressive conflict tactics. The relevance of the evidence for policy and practice are drawn out. A distinction can be drawn between responses to pathological behaviour by parents and normative, yet harmful, conflict resolution strategies. Public health approaches to promote reasoning within families as well as prevention and early intervention strategies that support all families, not just economically disadvantaged parents known to child protection and domestic violence agencies, are required. In addition, greater sensitivity to children's gender and stage of development and more attention to policies that reduce stress on families and violence within communities are advocated.

Magister Psychologiae - MPsych / Women's roles in the workplace have increased but expectations within their family roles have not diminished. Work-family conflict (WFC) occurs when work and family roles are mutually incompatible in some respect. Mothers' representations of their own particular personal contexts seem largely absent from the cultural iconography and so motivations for the study included bringing to light the phenomenological experiences of contemporary full-time working mothers by developing a rich description of their lived experience. These ideas have not been widely explored in South Africa. The study aimed to explore how full-time working mothers experience work-family conflict, including how they conceptualise their dual roles, how salient each role is to them, the factors in the work and family domains which are particularly pertinent for them and any coping strategies they might employ. The study used as a theoretical framework the model of work-family conflict developed by Greenhaus and Beutell in 1985, together with an extension from the work of Amstad, Meier, Fasel, Elfering and Semmer in 2011. The study used a phenomenological methodology. Eight middle-class, professional, full-time working mothers from the Southern Suburbs and City Bowl of Cape Town were interviewed individually, using a semi-structured interview schedule. A qualitative paradigm was used to analyse the interviews. Emotional and cognitive repercussions of WFC were many, including feelings of unsustainability. Some participants acknowledged a need to compromise in order to cope, but the current normative messages are not conducive to this. Participants aspire, not to stop working, because the role of worker is regarded as important for self-definition, but to reduce their overall load. The generalisability of this study was reduced because of its localised ambit, its small size and some similarities in socio-economic profile among the participants. Future studies could further explore the choices or strategies which are successful in reducing WFC.

The aim of this study was to explore the relationship between work-family conflict, stress and burnout among South African Social Security Agency (SASSA) employees. For this purpose data was collected from the SASSA agency offices in Alice, King Williams Town and East London. A sample of 72 agency employees was drawn from the population. Results of the study indicated that the study variables are significantly positively correlated with one another. Work family conflict was found to be significantly positively correlated with stress. Stress was also found to be significantly positively correlated with burnout. A significant positive relationship was also found to exist between work family conflict and burnout. The findings of this study are helpful in the social security agency industry in order to design human resources policies which will reduce turnover of agency employees by reducing stress, work family conflict and burnout among the agency employees.