The large-scale entrance of women into the workforce over the past two decades has fundamentally changed the nature of work and family life. This trend has been associated with a constellation of emerging challenges and conflicts in balancing work and family spheres. Gutek, Searle, and Klepa (1991) developed two models for explaining work-family conflict. The Rational Model proposed that workfamily conflict is directly proportionate to the amount of time one spends in work and family activities. The Gender Role Model proposed that work-family conflict is moderated by gender role socialization, in that men are predicted to experience greater work-family conflict when family responsibilities interfere with their career, whereas women are predicted to experience greater conflict when their career interferes with their family responsibilities. To date, models of work-family conflict have been largely derived from White samples, and it has not been established that our models can be generalized across culture. Distinct cultural histories between Black and White women suggest potential differences in how work-family conflict is experienced across ethnicity.The purpose of this study was to test a measure of work-family conflict for invariance across ethnicity. Participants were 111 Black and 119 White, married, middle-income mothers with dependent children who worked outside of the home on a full-time basis. It was hypothesized that Gutek et al.'s (1991) measure of work-family conflict would demonstrate variance across ethnicity. The study further extended Gutek's research by hypothesizing that White women would experience greater work-family conflict when work interfered with family responsibilities than the reverse, and that Black women would be equally sensitive to interference with either domain. Results of a multi-sample confirmatory factor analysis failed to confirm the hypothesis of construct bias or the prediction that White women would be more sensitive to work interference with family life than the reverse. The results of this study supported the prediction that among Black women, there would be no differences in the relationship between family interference with work and work interference with family on total work-family conflict. Limitations of the present study and implications for future research were discussed. / Department of Counseling Psychology and Guidance Services

This study will contribute to existing work–family research by bringing a rich emic understanding of caregivers’ experience with work-eldercare crisis. I adopted Weick’s theory of organizational sensemaking (1995) as method and methodology for this research. I collected data via open-ended, semi-structured interviews with employees who balance full-time employment with caregiving for an elderly person; then I subjected the transcribed texts to a detailed thematic analysis. This analysis helped me identify three main themes that reflect the processes participants use to ‘make sense’ of their experiences. The results of this study suggest that caregivers enact the work environment to attempt creating balance—and to enlist support and assistance—by strategically engaging in interpersonal interactions with others at work about their eldercare activities. They combine past experience with the knowledge obtained from these interactions to develop heuristic scripts, and then use them to enable understanding and guide future behaviour and actions. This study demonstrates that sensemaking is a useful analytical framework through which to examine employees’ experience of the work-family interface. The findings of this research offer insight into the processes involved in the social construction of informal organizational policies; the implications provide a foundation to develop better models of organizational response towards employees’ work-eldercare needs / xi, 171 leaves ; 29 cm

This thesis reports comparative analyses of the work and family nexus for a group of working mothers in Adelaide, Australia and Harare, Zimbabwe.

The timing of work over the day or week is fundamental to the nature of paid work and the interaction between work and leisure. However, due to data limitations, little research has been done on the timing of work in Australia. The Australian Time Use Survey, conducted nationally by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) in 1992 and 1997, provides a unique opportunity to examine actual work timing arrangements in the Australian workforce. (For complete abstract open document)

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Bowling Green State University, 2007. / Document formatted into pages; contains ix, 106 p. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Tulsa, 1993. / Bibliography: leaves 87-96.

Thesis (Ph.D.) - Carleton University, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 276-293). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.

Thesis (Ed.D.)--Teachers College, Columbia University, 1995. / Includes tables. Typescript; issued also on microfilm. Sponsor: L. Lee Knefelkamp. Dissertation Committee: Marie Theresa O'Toole. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 104-108).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Ohio University, March, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 103-115)

Thesis (doctoral)--Göteborgs universitet, 2003. / Extra t.p. with thesis statement inserted. Includes bibliographical references.