The purpose of the present study was to investigate the factors that may be related to employees' decisions to use the family-friendly benefits (e.g., maternity/paternity leave, flexible work schedule) that are offered to them by their employers. Research has shown that both employees and organizations benefit when employees use family-friendly benefits. However, research has also shown that many employees do not take advantage of such benefits. Studies examining this issue are limited, and much of the research that has been conducted is anecdotal and atheoretical. The present study overcame this problem by empirically examining the use of family-friendly benefits within the theoretical context of Ajzen's (1991) theory of planned behavior. The results of this study support the theory of planned behavior. Specifically, the results indicated that whether an individual perceived he/she had control over the use of family-friendly benefits was the most predictive of whether he/she intended to use them. Whether the individual perceived that others would approve of these behaviors was also predictive of intention to perform the behaviors. In addition, an individual's intention to take leave or use a flexible work schedule was the most predictive of whether he or she actually engaged in the behaviors. Implications for practice as well as future research directions are also discussed.

The purpose of this research was to determine the effect work environment has on occupational commitment and intent to leave the profession for bedside registered nurses. Subscales of autonomy, control over the practice setting, nurse-physician relationship, and organizational support were incorporated into the analysis to determine which aspect of work environment most directly effects occupational commitment and intent to leave the profession. The research was undertaken in order to help administrators determine the ways in which work environment can be improved upon in order to retain bedside registered nurses in the profession. An explanatory cross sectional survey was distributed to 259 direct care bedside registered nurses employed at a rural, system affiliated hospital in Central Florida. Human subject protection was assured through the University of Central Florida Institutional Review Board. A 77 item questionnaire containing 9 demographic questions, 57 questions from the Nursing Work Index- Revised (NWI-R), 8 questions from Blau's occupational commitment scale, and 3 questions from Blau's intent to leave scale was distributed to all direct care nurses. Subjects were also given the opportunity to complete 3 short answer questions. A 32.8 percent response rate was achieved for a total of 85 complete and usable surveys. Data analysis showed that the work environment is positively related to occupational commitment and negatively related to intent to leave. In addition each of the four subscales (autonomy, control over the practice setting, relationship with physicians, and organizational support) were also positively related to occupational commitment and negatively related to intent to leave the profession. Implications for organizations, public policy and future research are discussed.

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In 1974, the Swedish parental insurance, which includes remuneration in the form of parental benefit, has been statutory, and has thus existed for over 40 years. The issue of parental benefit and parental leave has to a large extent been the basis for the discussion on gender equality (Försäkringskassan, 2019). The issue of gender equality is a complex political issue, which can be described in the family sphere and how gender equality lives. It is problematic that women still take out more of parental leave than men. Who should take responsibility for the care of and households entails consequences far beyond the family sphere, especially for women's opportunities in the labor market (Statens offentliga utredningar, 2014). The purpose of this study is to examine a group's mother's reflections and experiences regarding the regulation and distribution of parental benefit in the parental insurance. What negotiations and strategies are behind the own distribution of parental benefit in their family. Women's conditions and the unequal power relations in the family sphere, ties in with how work in the home is distributed, how different tasks go to different family members, based on gender, based on different roles (Giddens & Sutton, 2014). There is a picture of the family that is constantly negotiating. An explicit negotiation is an open debate with a discussion and an active and conscious decision-making, while an implicit negotiation is concealed and unspoken. The majority of everyday decisions are unspoken, implicit (Grönlund & Halleröd, 2008). The study was conducted with a qualitative interview method, in order to best capture the interviewees' subjective experiences and thoughts. Then the material has been analyzed through thematic analysis, and interpreted through the theoretical framework. The study's results showed that the distribution of parental benefit in the parental insurance among the surveyed mothers is usually based on an experience that "it just became so". Their descriptions can be interpreted as saying that the distribution has mainly been created by so-called implicit negotiations, non-decisions (Grönlund & Halleröd, 2008; Ahrne & Roman, 1997). Based on routines and rituals, learned behaviors and expectations that can often be linked to notions of gender (Grönlund & Halleröd, 2008). The most prominent problem that the study's results showed was the women's experience of being in a position of dependence on their partner, and a reluctance to do so. / 1974 lagstadgades den svenska föräldraförsäkringen som innefattar ersättning i form av föräldrapenning, den har alltså funnits i över 40 år.Frågan om föräldrapenning och föräldraledighet har i stor utsträckning kommit att ligga till grund för diskussionen om jämställdhet(Försäkringskassan, 2019).Jämställdhetsfrågan är en komplex politisk fråga, som kan börja beskrivas inom familjesfären och hur jämställt familjer lever. Det är problematiskt att kvinnor fortfarande tar ut mer av föräldraledigheten än män. Vem som ska ta ansvar för omsorg av och hushåll medför konsekvenser långt utanför familjesfären, framförallt för kvinnors möjligheter på arbetsmarknaden(Statens offentliga utredningar, 2014).Syftet med denna studie är att undersöka en grupp mammors reflektioner och upplevelser kring regleringen och fördelningen av föräldrapenningen i föräldraförsäkringen. Vilka förhandlingar och strategier som ligger bakom den egna fördelningen av föräldrapenningen i deras familj. Kvinnors villkor och de ojämlika maktrelationerna i familjesfären, knyter an till hur arbete i hemmet fördelas, hur olika uppgifter tillfaller olika familjemedlemmar, utifrån kön, utifrån olika roller (Giddens & Sutton, 2014). Det finns en bild av familjen som ständigt förhandlande. En explicit förhandling är en öppen förhandling med en diskussionoch ett aktivt och medvetet beslutsfattande, medan en implicit förhandling sker dolt och outtalat. Majoriteten av vardagliga beslut sker outtalade, implicit (Grönlund & Halleröd, 2008).Studien är genomförd med kvalitativ intervjumetod, för att på bästa sätt kunna fånga intervjupersonernas subjektiva upplevelser och tankar. Sedan har materialet analyserats genom tematisk analys, och tolkats genom det teoretiska ramverket. Studiens resultat visade att fördelningen av föräldrapenningen i föräldraförsäkringen bland det tillfrågade mammorna oftast grundar sig i en upplevelse av att ”det bara blev så”. Deras beskrivningar kan tolkas som att fördelningen framför allt har blivit till genom så kallade implicita förhandlingar, icke-beslut (Grönlund & Halleröd, 2008)(Ahrne & Roman, 1997). Som baseras på rutiner och ritualer, inlärda beteenden och förväntningar som ofta kan kopplas till föreställningar om kön (Grönlund & Halleröd, 2008). Den mest framträdande problematiken som studiens resultat visade, var kvinnornas upplevelse av att hamna i beroendeställning till sin partner, och en ovilja till det.

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Hiring and maintaining quality staff members is crucial in juvenile correctional facilities. Unfortunately, staff turnover is much more common in correctional agencies than other areas of government work. Although several studies have looked at rates and predictors of employee turnover in adult correctional facilities, few have assessed the issue among juvenile correctional staff. Therefore, this study was guided by two main questions: (1) what are the current turnover rates among frontline staff members at Delaware's public juvenile correctional facilities, and (2) what are the main factors that lead to frontline staff leaving? To answer the above questions, this study used a mixed-methods approach consisting of three stages. In the first stage, total rates of voluntary turnover were provided by an administrator from Delaware State's Division of Youth Rehabilitative Services (DYRS) Personnel Department. The voluntary turnover rates for juvenile correctional officers in Delaware's public facilities for 2011 and 2012 were 7 percent and 13 percent, respectively. This is slightly less than voluntary turnover rates from previous studies on juvenile correctional staff. The next two stages of research were designed to assess the best predictors of intentions to leave for Delaware's frontline staff members. Specifically, the second stage consisted of interviews with 14 staff members from five residential facilities across Delaware. The interviews increased our understanding of how aspects of job satisfaction and organizational commitment apply to this particular sample of employees and provided greater insight into two recently developed aspects of employee turnover theory: Job Embeddedness and the Employment Opportunity Index (EOI). More importantly, three aspects of employee turnover for this sample were discovered: commitment to youth, career stepping stone and job expectations. The discovery of new variables supports the idea that it is important for researchers assessing employee turnover to conduct face-to-face interviews with employees prior to analyzing survey data. The final stage of research compared three models of employee turnover. The first was based on Lambert's 2001 model of correctional officer turnover which stemmed from employee turnover theory. The second model was designed to assess improvement in predicting intentions to leave by incorporating two concepts, Job Embeddedness and the Employment Opportunity Index (EOI), that have not been tested in many studies on employee turnover. The last model that was tested incorporated the three new variables that were created based on the interviews in stage two. Intentions to leave was used as the outcome variable in this study. It measures the extent to which a person desires to leave his or her job. It was chosen for two reasons: 1) Samples consisting of employees who have quit can take years to obtain and 2) Assessing employees intentions to leave could be more useful to administrators. The sample for the last stage of this study consisted of 102 frontline staff members from five of Delaware's six facilities. The data for the last portion of this study were analyzed using structural equation modeling (SEM). This method was appropriate because it could assess the impact of both direct and indirect measures. However, because the sample size for this study was not adequate to run any of the models in full, ordinary least squares (OLS) regression was also incorporated. Results from the quantitative portion of this study showed that there were several variables that predicted intentions to leave for this sample. Similar to most studies that look at intentions to leave, job satisfaction and organizational commitment were two of the strongest predictors of intentions to leave. In terms of individual characteristics, race/ethnicity was the only statistically significant predictor. What was especially interesting about this result was that when previous studies found a race effect, it was that African Americans had higher levels of intentions to leave. This was not the case for this sample. Along these lines, race/ethnicity was significantly associated with one of the factors from Job Embeddedness, organizational fit, which assesses if employees believe they are an appropriate match for their job. Interestingly, whites had lower levels of organizational fit which resulted in higher levels of intentions to leave. Findings from this study have implications for the correctional literature and employee turnover theory. This study supported a long history of employee turnover studies that have found job satisfaction and organizational commitment to be the best predictors of employee turnover. At the same time, this study also found a new predictor of employee turnover specific to juvenile correctional officers: commitment to youth. This stands to have a major impact on future research on employee turnover, not just for juvenile corrections but also studies in the larger body of employee turnover in that this study made it clear that one model does not fit all workers. The concept, commitment to youth, applies only to employees who work with youths. And, the particular way commitment to youth was measured in the present study would only apply to those who work with at-risk youths. Therefore, this study should be viewed as an important step towards understanding the relationship between commitment to youth and decisions made by juvenile correctional officers. This study also had important implications for administrators of juvenile correctional facilities. A major finding stemming from the interviews, which was subsequently confirmed by the quantitative analysis, was that support from coworkers is vital to the overall performance of staff. In fact, subjects reported that a lack of support from coworkers was the difference between a good day and a bad day, and that it was never the juveniles that created a bad day for staff; it was their coworkers. Based on this finding, it is vital that administrators stress the importance of not only working as a team, but also the importance of respecting fellow staff members, especially in front of youths. To do this, administrators should encourage supervisors to demonstrate this type of behavior every day and stress the importance of it during trainings, especially the impact it can have on the residents; several staff members discussed how the youthful offenders can easily detect bad feelings among staff. / Criminal Justice