Work-Family Dynamics and Women's Transitions into Parenthood

University Of Texas At Austin, Austin TX

Investigators

Linked publications & trials

Abstract

? DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The potential for work demands to conflict with family responsibilities has long been considered a major social issue with implications for health and well-being, including and especially for women. Likewise, the potential struggles of the transition into parenthood-and the consequences for parents and children-has drawn a great deal of attention in research and policy. This proposed R21 connects these significant issues by exploring how the work conditions of new mothers affect the stress that they feel when their children are young, with a special focus on those whose children have special health and developmental challenges and on differences among women who are single or involved in various kinds of romantic partnerships. Identifying which mothers are at risk (or thriving) and which kinds of jobs hurt (or help) them can support women's health during a critical period of their lives with potential benefits for workplace productivity and children's positive development. The innovations of this project include the integration of rich occupational data from a representative sample of U.S. workers with detailed data on families from a representative sample of U.S. children, the consideration of positive work conditions that facilitate work-family balance and not just the negative work conditions that lead to work-family conflict, the exploration of the role of children's health and behavior in strengthening or weakening the potential effects of work on mothers, the examination of mothers' partnership statuses as both reciprocally related to their work conditions and influencing how they experience those conditions, and the steps taken to address some threats to causal inference that are common in the work-family literature. Occupational data from O*NET will be incorporated into the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort to create a broad battery of work characteristics and conditions for mothers, with latent class analysis and other techniques used to identify multi-dimensional work profiles. These time-varying work variables will then be used to predict mothers' feelings of parenting stress and depressive symptomatology across the first four years of their children's lives with cross-lagged structural equation modeling, with fixed and random effects employed to address the potential impact of stable unobservable confounds and post-hoc robustness indices calculated to assess the potential impact of time-varying unobservable confounds. These models will be estimated for comparisons of employment statuses among all mothers, regardless of their labor force participation histories, and for comparisons of work conditions among mothers in the labor force. They will be extended to consider interactions between work variables and measures of children's health and behavioral problems, with group modeling techniques allowing the comparison of results across various subsamples of mothers defined by their partnership statuses. The ultimate goal of this project is to use what is learned here, in tandem with past NIH-funded work by the investigators, to design a future population study of work-family dynamics among new parents, which captures the general spirit of the R21 mechanism.