Work and family in the 1990s
Maureen Perry-Jenkins; Rena L Repetti; Ann C Crouter
Journal of Marriage and Family; Nov 2000; 62, 4; Wilson Social Sciences Abstracts PlusText
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Maureen Perry-Jenkins    University of Massachusetts—Amherst
Rena L. Repetti    University of California—Los Angeles*
Ann C. Crouter    Pennsylvania State University**
Work and Family in the 1990s
This review highlights four themes emerging from the work and family literature of the 1990s. The first theme evolves from the historical legacy of the maternal employment literature with its focus on children 's well-being. The second theme, work socialization, is based on the premise that occupational conditions, such as autonomy and complexity, shape the values of workers who in turn generalize these lessons off the job. Research on work stress, the third theme, explores how experiences of short- and long-term stress at work make their mark on workers' behavior and well-being off the job. Finally, the multiple roles literature focuses on how individuals balance roles, such as parent, spouse, and worker, and the consequences for health and family relationships. In addition to these four major themes, advances in work and family policy initiatives over the past decade are discussed. Suggestions for future research focus on addressing issues of causality, attending to the complexity of social contexts, linking research to
Department of Psychology, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA 01002 (mpj@psych.umass.edu).
^Department of Psychology, University of California-Angeles, CA 90095-1563.
-Los
**College of Health and Human Development, 105 White Henderson Building, Penn State University, University Park, PA 16802.
Key Words: job stress, parental employment, work and family, work-family policy.
policy, and developing interdisciplinary theories and research designs.
The domain of "work and family*' emerged as a distinct area of research in the 1960s and 1970s. By the 1980s, what had begun as a narrow research area, focused on dual-career families and "working mothers," had evolved into a sprawling domain of study involving researchers from several disciplines and theoretical perspectives. Men-aghan and Parcel (1990) helped define the field in their decade review of research from the 1980s. Ten years later, researchers continue to be intrigued by the interplay between work and family, with particular emphasis on short- and long-term consequences of work for the quality of family life and the development of family members.
The 1990s stand out as a time of technological and economic change, broad trends that made their mark on the work-family interface in ways that are as yet poorly understood. The growing use of computers, pagers, and cell phones, for example, meant that, for some employees, work could be performed almost anywhere: at home, on the highway, or in an airplane. The American economy boomed throughout much of this decade, but the boom affected people quite differently depending on their place in the social structure: The income and opportunity gap widened between rich and poor and the skilled and unskilled (Mishel, Bernstein, & Schmitt, 1999; White & Rogers, current issue).
The 1990s witnessed continuing rate gains of
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labor force participation for women, particularly mothers. Following a temporary interruption in the growth of women's labor force participation in the early part of the decade, women's employ-ment slowly increased over the 1990s but at a slower rate than in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1997, the overall employment rate of women was 59.5%, with 63.9% of women with children under age 6 and 78.3% of women with children ages 6 to 17 employed (Hayghe, 1997). Latino and American Indian mothers were less likely to be employed than their European, African, and Asian American counterparts.
Although more Americans were employed in the 1990s than ever before, many experienced an increase in work hours and job instability, and, for low wage earners, a decline in real earned income (Mishel et al, 1999). The number of contingent workers, those holding jobs without long-term contracts, grew (Polivka, 1996; Rogers, 2000). A major study of the U.S. labor market suggests that growth in the labor force in the next 20 years will not keep pace with a continuing expansion in the number of jobs that are available, particularly for individuals proficient in math, science, and the English language. The projected shortage of workers is expected to lead to increases in benefits that attract and retain skilled workers. At the same time, Americans with low levels of education and technological expertise will face declining real wages (Judy & D'Amico, 1997).
We organize our review around four broad themes: maternal employment, work socialization, work stress, and multiple roles. The maternal employment literature is the legacy of more than six decades of developmental research on the potentially problematic effects of maternal work on children. In the 1990s, research in this tradition has expanded its focus to include the timing of work, as well as child care and parenting processes that may mediate or moderate the effects of both mothers' and fathers' work involvement on children. Grounded in the sociology of work and occupations, the work socialization literature stems from the premise that occupational conditions, such as autonomy and substantive complexity, shape the beliefs and values of workers who in turn generalize these lessons to other parts of their lives, including childrearing. Research on work stress, with roots in both occupational health and clinical psychology, explores how short- and long-term stress at work make their mark on workers' behavior and well-being off the job. The multiple roles literature, a product of both social
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psychological and sociological theorizing about social roles, focuses on how individuals manage the roles of parent, spouse, and worker and the consequences of this balance for health and family relationships. We highlight the rare cases where researchers have directly explored the family-to-work relationship and, in so doing, address the thorny issue of causality in the work-family literature. Finally, reflecting the fact that work and family polices became part of the national policy scene in the 1990s, we close with a look at how public policy, for better and for worse, has addressed the lives of working families.
Given the enormity of the work-family literature, several topics will not be addressed in this review. The effects of paid employment on families depend in part on how men and women divide unpaid family work, such as household chores and child care. Although we address the interrelationship between paid and unpaid work when relevant, paid work is our primary focus (see Coltrane, current issue, for a review of research on the division of household labor). Research on unemployment and economic distress, child and adolescent employment, and aging and retirement issues, are also beyond the purview of this review. The issue of elder care has become a pressing concern for many employed adults; we refer readers to the review by Allen, Blieszner, and Roberto (current issue) on families in later life that addresses this topic.
The Maternal Employment Tradition: Old Themes and New Directions
Impact of Maternal Employment on Children
The effect of maternal employment on children is an old theme in the work and family literature, but researchers gave it some new twists in the 1990s. Early in this decade, a number of studies explored the effects of early maternal employment on child outcomes, with inconsistent results. Using large, nationally representative data sets such as the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY), some studies reported significant relationships between maternal employment in the child's first year of life and negative cognitive and social outcomes (Baydar & Brooks-Gunn, 1991; Belsky & Eggebeen, 1991), whereas others found enhanced cognitive outcomes for children as a function of early maternal employment (Vandell & Ramanan, 1992) or no overall net effect (Blau & Grossberg, 1990).
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Using the latest NLSY data, Harvey (1999) reviewed the diverse methodological approaches to sample construction, measurement of outcomes, and the construction of early maternal employment variables in the early studies that may have led to such discrepant findings. In her reanalysis, neither early maternal nor paternal employment status, nor the timing and continuity of maternal employment, were consistently related to child outcomes. The few significant findings revealed that, for mothers, working more hours in the first 3 years was associated with slightly lower vocabulary scores up through age 9. Maternal employment during the 1st year of the child's life appeared to be slightly more beneficial for the children of single mothers, and early employment of mothers and fathers was related to more positive child outcomes for low-income families. Neither job satisfaction nor race moderated these effects. Although these results suggest parental employment status has few negative effects on young children, other research in the 1990s illuminated some of the conditions under which parental work makes its mark on family relations.
How Much and When Parents Work
The issue of how much adults—especially parents—work was a hot one in the 1990s, stimulated in part by the publication of Juliet Schor's (1991) The Overworked American, which argued that men's and women's work hours had increased the equivalent of "an extra month per year" from 1969 to 1987. The image of "overworked" mothers and fathers caught the attention of journalists and researchers alike. Using qualitative interview and observational data from one Fortune 500 "family-friendly" company, Hochschild (1997) argued that, for many workers, work had become home and home had become work with the result that workers were putting in increasingly long hours in the workplace as a way to avoid family time.
Other researchers questioned the notion of "overwork." Using time-use data, Robinson and Godbey (1997) argued that Americans had not increased the amount of time they devoted to work, but that the pace of their lives had quickened, with the result that many felt overworked. Jacobs and Gerson (in press) performed a more fine-grained analysis of work hours, focusing not only on actual hours worked but on employees' work hour preferences. They found evidence of "overwork" for professional, managerial, and technical work-
ers who worked long hours but preferred to work less, and evidence of underemployment for the least educated segment of the workforce, a group that was more likely to work part-time but preferred to work (and earn) more. Parental overwork and underemployment matter for children. Parcel and Menaghan (1994) found, for example, that when fathers worked less than full-time during their children's early years, children had elevated behavior problems, whereas overtime paternal hours were linked to decreased verbal facility.
Studies focused on parents' work hours have tended to ignore the temporal patterning of those hours, with most of the work-family literature assuming that workers hold jobs with fixed, daytime schedules (Presser, 1994). Presser's research suggests, however, that the overlap in spouses' employment schedules has important implications for family life. The less husbands' and wives' schedules overlap, the more husbands are involved in family work (Presser), including child care (Bray-field, 1995). White and Keith (1990) found, however, that non-daytime hours of employment are associated with higher levels of divorce. The "risk" of working nonstandard hours or days is not randomly distributed across the labor force; indeed, this work circumstance appears to exacerbate inequalities in family life. Less educated mothers are much more likely to work nonstandard hours and days than are better educated mothers (Presser & Cox, 1997), as are never-married mothers, a group that is disproportionately overrepresented in low-level, service-sector jobs (Cox & Presser, in press).
Temporal variations in work across the seasons of the year, days of the week and the hours of the day received some attention in this decade (Crou-ter & Larson, 1998). Crouter and McHale (1993) examined variations in family processes as a function of season of the year, finding "temporal rhythms" in patterns of parent-child involvement in joint activities and parental monitoring across the year, especially for parents whose involvement in paid work decreased sharply from winter to summer. The day can also be parsed into qualitatively different periods that vary in terms of their meaning. Larson and Richards (1994), who collected time use and mood data from family members by "beeping" them at random times of day, found that emotional affect during the early evening hours differed dramatically for husbands and wives in dual-earner families. For husbands, it was a time to relax, recover from the stresses of the workday, and begin leisure activities; for
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wives, it was a time to gear up after the relatively enjoyable workday and to focus on housework and child care.
Developmental researchers have been slow to recognize the dynamic nature of parents' work. An exception was a study by Moorehouse (1991), which focused on mechanisms that may buffer children from potentially negative effects of changes in mothers' levels of involvement in paid employment. She found that when mothers frequently engaged in shared activities with their children, such as reading books and telling stories, the potentially disruptive effects of changes in employment status on children's social and cognitive competence were mitigated.
Child-Care Quality as a Link Between Parental Work and Child Functioning
One of the most important moderators of the relationship between parental employment and child functioning is the nature and quality of alternative care that children experience. In the largest study of its kind, the National Institute of Child Health and Development's (NICHD) Early Child Care Research Network set out to ascertain whether nonmaternal care in the 1st year of life had detrimental effects on children's development. The 10-site study found no evidence in support of this controversial hypothesis (NICHD, 1997a, 1997b). Findings clearly indicated that child care by itself was unrelated to the quality of mother-infant attachment. Results, however, did point to less secure attachment relationships when the combined effects of poor-quality care, unstable care, and more than minimal amounts of care were coupled with insensitive mothering (NICHD, 1997b).
Care and supervision issues continue to be important throughout childhood and adolescence. Crouter, MacDermid, McHale, and Perry-Jenkins (1990) identified parental monitoring—parents' day-to-day knowledge about their school-aged children's companions, activities, and whereabouts—as a moderator of the effects of maternal work hours on academic and conduct outcomes. In one of the few studies that examined after-school care during middle childhood, Marshall et al (1997) found that, for lower income (but not middle-income) children, unsupervised after-school time was associated with more externalizing behaviors, whereas attending an after-school program was associated With fewer internalizing problems. Studies that examined the relationship between maternal employment and adolescent
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functioning consistently revealed no direct relationships between maternal work hours and adolescents' adjustment (Armistead, Wierson, & Forehand, 1990), parent-adolescent relations (Paulson, Koman, & Hill, 1990), or academic achievement (Müller, 1995). Muller, however, emphasized the importance of the time spent without adult supervision as an important moderator. Adolescents performed better on math achievement tests when mothers were employed part-time or not at all; this finding was entirely explained by unsupervised time after school, however. Müller concluded that full-time employment of mothers may negatively affect adolescents' academic achievement when mothers lack time, resources, or both to secure supervised activities for their children outside of school hours.
New Directions for Future Research
A strength of research in the maternal employment tradition is its attention to children and its multifaceted approach to assessing child functioning. Its weakness lies in the fairly unidimensional assessments of work and the lack of attention to the role of fathers and extended kin in the work-family relationship. Ironically, the maternal employment and day-care literatures are virtually separate fields of study, despite the fact that they are so intimately intertwined in the real world. A next step for child development scholars is to add school or day care to the study of work and family. In addition, some researchers are beginning to ask children directly what they think about then-parents' work and family roles. Galinsky (1999), for example, suggested that children may perceive a more positive picture of work-family linkages than their parents do. We urge the next generation of scholars to include a wider range of child "outcomes," including children's own perceptions of their mothers' and fathers' work.
The Workplace as a Context for Adult Socialization
Work Complexity, Home Environments, and Child Functioning
Among the most significant contributions to the work-family literature this decade has been greater scrutiny of the work environment. The groundbreaking work of Kohn and Schooler (Kohn & Schooler, 1982; Kohn, 1995) laid the foundation for much of the research in the 1990s that ex-
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plored how occupational self-direction (that is, the extent to which work offers opportunities for employees to exercise autonomy and to focus on substantively complex tasks with minimal supervision), socializes the worker in ways that are generalized to life off the job. As Kohn originally formulated these ideas, workers' value orientations, particularly the extent to which they value self-direction (vs. conformity) for themselves and their children, were a pivotal link between occupational conditions and workers' behavior off the job. Contemporary research, however, has tended to infer, rather than measure, workers' value orientations; thus, the full process by which work shapes the developing cognitions of employed adults, who in turn operationalize those ideas in their daily family lives, awaits future research.
Important research by Menaghan and Parcel throughout the 1990s revealed that the occupational complexity of mothers' work is related to the extent to which they create a positive home environment for their children, meaning a family context that provides cognitive stimulation, emotional support, and safety (Menaghan & Parcel, 1991; Parcel & Menaghan, 1994a, 1994b). In addition to attending to the variability in the work context, these researchers explored family conditions and maternal resources as they influence child outcomes, attempting to tease apart the direct and combinative effects of work conditions and family conditions on child functioning. A particular strength of their research is the careful effort to account for variables that might indicate selection effects into more complex jobs, such as educational, intellectual, and psychological resources.
Parcel and Menaghan (1993) hypothesized that workers subjected to greater autonomy and self-supervision on the job will place less emphasis on direct parental control over their children and instead promote children's ability to internalize parental norms, which in tum lowers the probability of behavior problems. Testing this hypothesis with a sample of married couples with at least one child, they found that higher levels of occupational complexity for fathers served as a protective factor against later child behavior problems. For mothers, substantively complex work was not directly related to children's behavior problems; however, having a more substantively complex job was subsequently more protective for children of divorced or separated mothers. Cooksey, Men-aghan, and Jekielek (1997) elaborated on this line of research with a larger subsample of the NLSY
that included single- and two-parent families. These researchers found that when controlling for family structure, maternal employment characterized by more autonomy, working with people, and problem solving predicted decreases in child behavior problems.
Turning to similar analyses that examined children's cognitive functioning, increases in mothers' job complexity was related to enhanced reading scores for children (Parcel & Menaghan, 1994a). Moreover, mothers' intellectual ability interacted with job complexity such that the benefits of mothers' higher levels of intellectual skills were greater when mothers' cognitive skills were continually reinforced in a highly complex work environment (Parcel & Menaghan). The most interesting findings document how combinations of changing work and family circumstances influence changes in the quality of children's home environments. Mothers who began employment in jobs characterized by low to average complexity showed decrements over time in the quality of the home environment they provided their children. Mothers who experienced the greatest gains from highly complex work settings were continuously employed single mothers (Menaghan & Parcel, 1995). Two important themes emerge from this line of research. The first is the importance of considering the multiplicative effects of social contexts, and the second is the significance of lagged effects whereby work and family conditions have greater effects over time than concurrently. Parcel and Menaghan's findings support the notion that holding a job low in complexity, or entering such a job, may drain parental energy, discourage mothers' intellectual growth, and discourage chil-drearing values and practices that teach children to internalize norms (Parcel & Menaghan, 1994b).
Parcel and Menaghan's studies laid important groundwork for understanding how experiences on the job shape the lives of workers and their children. As noted in these studies, however, because of constraints of the NLSY sample, the authors were unable to examine an important intervening variable in the socialization hypothesis, namely, parenting behavior. Related studies, however, provide additional support for the socialization hypothesis. Grimm-Thomas and Perry-Jenkins (1994) found that fathers with greater complexity and autonomy at work reported higher self-esteem which, in turn, was linked to less authoritarian parenting. Greenberger, O'Neil, & Nagel (1994) reported that parents whose jobs were more complex responded with greater warmth to
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their children and offered verbal explanations to them that were of higher quality than was the case for parents with less complex work. Similarly, in a sample of White, rural, dual-earner couples with adolescent children, Whitbeck et al. (1997) found that fathers, but not mothers, with more job autonomy had more flexible parenting styles that were, in turn, linked to a sense of mastery and control in their adolescent children.
New Directions for Research on Work Socialization
Parcel and Menaghan have paved the way toward a more complete understanding of the work-family interface by revealing specific cases where the interaction and timing of work and family circumstances either enhance or undermine positive child functioning. Despite efforts to examine how factors such as race and family structure may moderate processes linking work complexity to child outcomes, few significant results emerged (Men-aghan & Parcel, 1991). Before concluding that social context does not play a role in these relationships, however, it may be important to construct and examine multidimensional ecological niches that include layers of contexts such as social class, family structure, and race. Processes linking work complexity to home environment may differ markedly for a low-income, White, single mother, for example, than for a middle-income, Latino, married mother (Perry-Jenkins & Gillman, in press).
Findings from the work socialization tradition hold important implications for workplace innovations and policy. A complete approach to family-supportive policy would go beyond enabling employees to take time away from work (e.g., leave time, flextime) or to increase their time at work (e.g., on-site child care) to focus on changing the conditions of work that are related to individual and family functioning (Lambert, 1993, 1999; MacDermid & Targ, 1995). As Menaghan and Parcel (1995) have suggested, welfare reform policies that push parents into jobs with low wages, low complexity, and long hours may hold negative consequences for the children of the working poor.
The Impact of Occupational Stress on Families
Work stress has probably received more attention from work-family researchers than any other job
condition. This literature is based on the idea that any effect that stress has on an individual's psychological, and even physiological, functioning will ultimately influence his or her behavior at home and, in so doing, have an impact on the family and all of its members. We distinguish in our review between job stressors, objective conditions at work that tax an individual's emotional, physical, and cognitive stores, and stress, the individual's internal response to those conditions. We also distinguish between two different research paradigms: investigations of the possible long-term impact of chronic job stress and a growing literature on the effects of short-term fluctuations in job stressors.
The Transfer of Chronic Job Stress Into Families
There is now a substantial body of research suggesting that chronic job stressors influence families when they cause feelings of overload or conflict between the roles of worker and family member. Hughes, Galinsky, & Morris (1992) found that the association between chronic stressors at work and marital tension was mediated by the worker's perception that work and family fife interfered with each other. Crouter, Bumpus, Ma-guire, & McHale (1999) found that mothers and fathers who described more pressure at work also reported greater role overload and a feeling of being overwhelmed by multiple commitments. Higher levels of role overload were, in turn, associated with increased conflict with adolescent offspring. A structural equation model supported a path from work pressure to role overload to parent-adolescent conflict to adolescent well-being. MacDermid and Williams (1997) reported similar findings in a study of female bank workers. Those who reported poor supervision at work also described greater difficulty managing work and family demands, which was linked to mothers' reports of increased child behavior problems via its association with less nurturing parenting.
In the model that underlies most chronic-stress transfer research, the predictor of family outcomes tends not to be an objective job characteristic (e.g., a job stressor), but rather internal distress in response to experiences in work and family roles. For example, feelings of job stress have been related to self-reports of distress, such as depression, which have in turn been linked to poorer marital relations (Barling & MacEwen, 1992; Sears & Galambos, 1992). People who report more conflict
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and overload due to the combination of work and family roles tend to also describe more emotional distress (Gerstel & Gallagher, 1993; Guelzow, Bird, & Koball, 1991; Paden & Buehler, 1995), and these experiences are linked to problematic parent-child relations and negative child outcomes (Bird & Kemerait, 1990; Bowen, 1998; Galambos, Sears, Almeida, & Kolaric, 1995; MacEwen & Barling, 1991). One of the shortcomings in this approach is the assumption of causal priority. Little effort has been devoted to the testing of recursive models whereby emotional distress and family functioning affect perceptions of job stress and role strain.
One of the interesting features of the chronic stress transfer studies published in the 1990s is that they tended to report either no direct correlation or very little correlation between an individual's scores on global measures of stress at work and assessments of individual or family functioning. The link to a marital or parent-child relationship outcome was only observed through an individual well-being mediator, such as role strain or emotional distress (Barling & MacEwen, 1992; Crouter et al., 1999; Galambos & Maggs, 1990; Greenberger et al., 1994; Sears & Galambos, 1992). In addition, some of the modest, although statistically significant, cross-sectional correlations between self-reported job stress and unsatisfying or dysfunctional family relationships are subject to respondent-bias explanations (Stewart & Barling, 1996; Wortman, Biernat, & Lang, 1991).
Studies that assessed specific job stressors in homogenous samples were more likely to find associations between job stressors and family outcomes (e.g., Hughes et al., 1992). Repetti (1994), studying fathers in a single occupation (air traffic control), found a propensity for members of work teams with a negative social climate at work (e.g., little or no "group spirit," interpersonal conflicts, etc.) to describe daily after-work interactions with their children as having a more negative emotional tone. This association was observed even when measure of the team social climate was based solely on descriptions provided by the air traffic controllers' coworkers.
To the extent that chronic work stress influences general patterns of family interaction, one might also expect to observe an impact on individual family members. Tests of a direct association between an individual's experience of stressors at work and the well-being of other family members, sometimes referred to as a "cross-over
effect," have been inconclusive. In some studies, a spouse's feelings of depression or overload have been greater when a husband (Crouter et al, 1999) or a wife (Wortman et al., 1991) reported more pressure or overloads at work. Other studies, however, have failed to detect cross-over effects from wives' job pressures and overloads to their husbands' well-being, (Crouter et al., 1999) or marital adjustment (Sears & Galambos, 1992). At least one study found that mothers' reports of more demands at work were directly associated with their reports of more behavior problems in their children (MacDermid & Williams, 1997). No evidence for cross-over has been found when parents' reports of job stressors were related to information about children from independent sources, such as teachers' descriptions of child behavior problems (Stewart & Barling, 1996) or adolescents' self-reports of their psychological adjustment (Crouter et al, 1999; Galambos & Maggs, 1990).
Why are uniform, across-the-board chronic-stress transfer effects often not observed in studies" that use heterogeneous samples and global measures of stress? Why are even the significant findings generally not strong? We believe that individual, family, and social context differences exert important influences on the transfer of stress from work to family. Research in the next decade should focus much more heavily on these moderators by asking under what conditions are which job stressors transferred to which families; how is stress transmitted, and what different types of outcomes are observed? Research in the 1990s has already provided some important clues.
Job stressors have an impact on families when they cause some experience of stress within the individual, such as emotional distress, fatigue, a sense of conflict between work and family roles, or role overload. In the absence of one or more of these intervening links, stress transfer cannot occur. That may explain why many well-designed studies have not found direct associations between job stressors and family outcomes. Many men and women report no work-family strains at all (Marshall & Barnett, 1993). Responses to any stressor, including job stressors, are shaped by personality, coping style, and social support. Recent research points to characteristics of work and family that shape the transfer of stress process.
Vulnerability to role strain seems to vary according to structural characteristics of both job and family, such as the number and flexibility of work hours, family size, and ages of children
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(Guelzow et al, 1991; Marshall & Barnett, 1991; O'Neil & Greenberger, 1994). Role commitment and involvement, occupational prestige, and spouse support are other factors that may influence one's experience of role strain (Frone, Russell, & Cooper, 1992; O'Neil & Greenberger, 1994). Marital quality appears to act as a particularly important moderator. On one hand, stress may transfer more readily between people in close, stable relationships, If greater emotional involvement carries with it a "burden of care" (Rook, Dooley, & Catalano, 1991), individuals who are committed and happy in their family roles may find work-family conflicts more distressing (Wortman et al, 1991). On the other hand, an unhappy marriage can exacerbate the effects of job stressors. In one study, a father's highly demanding job interfered with the parents' monitoring of their sons' daily activities, but only if the parents also described their marriage as (relatively) low in love and commitment (Bumpus, Crouter, & McHale, 1999). There is also evidence to suggest that the nature of work-family conflicts, and their impact on families, varies by race, occupation, and social class (Frone, Russell, & Cooper; Marshall & Barnett).
Throughout the 1990s, there have been important methodological improvements. Although many of the studies relied on cross-sectional, self-report questionnaire data, there were at least two prospective longitudinal studies (Galambos & Maggs, 1990; Rook, Dooley, & Catalano, 1991). Many studies avoided the problem of respondent biases inflating correlations between self-report measures by obtaining independent assessments of key variables. To answer questions about the conditions under which particular job stressors are transferred to particular families, research efforts in the next decade should shift from attempts to identify uniform stress transfer effects to investigations of individual and social context variables that moderates these connections.
The Study of Daily Stress Transfer Processes
The stress transfer research cited above focused on the possible long-term impact of chronic job stress. These studies suggest that changes over time in the employed individual's emotional and psychological functioning, particularly feelings of distress, role overload, and work-family conflict, result in interactions with family members that are less sensitive and responsive, and more negative and conflictual. Some researchers have attempted to observe "up close" the process of stress af-
fecting behavior at home using short-term, repeated measures designs.
Repetti (1994; Repetti & Wood, 1997a), for example, has found that employed spouses and parents tend to withdraw from family interaction following high stress days at work. Social withdrawal, which may help adults to cope in the short run with certain types of stressors, involves a pervasive reduction both in the amount of social interaction and in emotional responsiveness (Repetti, 1992). In one study, both maternal self-reports and independent observers indicated that mothers were more withdrawn from their preschoolers on days when the mothers had experienced greater workloads or interpersonal stress at work (Repetti & Wood, 1997a). Repetti (1994) also found evidence of social withdrawal in an analysis of daily data from air traffic controllers. Other analyses showed withdrawal from daily marital interactions following high workload shifts at the airport (Repetti, 1989). The potential short-term benefits of social withdrawal for the family are suggested by findings indicating that solitary time buffers the transmission of negative emotions from mothers to their children (Larson & Gillman, 1999).
In contrast to a social withdrawal response, negative emotion spillover occurs when feelings of frustration, anger, or disappointment at work lead to the expression of greater irritability and impatience or more power assertion at home. The air traffic controllers who were fathers appeared to respond to an increase in social stressors at work with both social withdrawal and negative emotional spillover (Repetti, 1994).
Evidence that an increase in stressful conditions at work is often followed by changes in behavior at home is supplemented by daily studies that point to the possible psychological and emotional mediators of these behavioral responses. Barling and his colleagues have used daily data to show that feelings of role overload and role conflict are associated with distressed emotional states and that these states are, in turn, linked to anger and withdrawal during marital interactions (Barling & Macintyre, 1993; MacEwen & Barling, 1994; MacEwen, Barling, & Kelloway, 1992). Other studies using intensive, repeated measures designs found that increases in job stressors, both distressing social interactions and work overload, are associated with a short-term deterioration in mood and physical well-being and increases in physiological arousal (Jamner, Shapiro, Goldstein, & Hug, 1991; Repetti, 1993). An exciting new literature on emotional transmission in families
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fills in a critical link by showing that events or emotions in one family member's experience predict subsequent emotions or behaviors in another family member (Larson & Almeida, 1999).
When put together, the findings from studies using intensive, repeated measures designs trace daily increases in certain stressful experiences at work to changes in individual psychological and physiological states, to social behaviors and interactions at home, to the feelings and well-being of other family members, all within several days. These studies have also investigated factors that moderate stress transfer processes. The evidence suggests that both stable individual and group differences, as well as circumstances that may change over time, help to shape how an increase in work stress might be subsequently transferred to the family. For example, both emotional reactivity to stressors and the process of negative emotional transmission within a family were strengthened when problems occurred earlier in the day (Almeida, Wethington, & Chandler, 1999; Marco & Suis, 1993) and were accompanied by other life stressors (Larson & Giilman, 1999).
Individual differences in personality and emotional functioning also shape short-term stress-transfer processes. Studies have found exaggerated emotional responses to work stressors, as well as other daily stressors, among individuals with higher levels of negative affectivity or neuroticism (Bolger & Schilling, 1991; Marco & Suis, 1993). Similarly, Repetti & Wood (1997a) found that daily job stressors had a much stronger impact on the parenting behavior of mothers with higher scores on type A behaviors, depression, and anxiety. The transmission of negative emotions within families also seems to be enhanced when there are marital or child conduct problems (Margolin, Christensen, & John, 1996) and when parenting is overcon-trolling (Larson & Giilman, 1999).
Depending on the circumstances, immediate responses to what is usually considered to be a job stressor can range from no detectable impact on the family, to increased irritability and anger, to social withdrawal. Our review suggests that individual, family, occupational, and other social context factors shape how an individual will respond to a day at work that taxes his or her emotional, physical, and cognitive stores.
New Directions for Occupational Stress Research
Two distinct approaches to the study of occupational stress have emerged: one that examines
long-term chronic job stress and another that focuses on short-term fluctuations of job stress across multiple days. The next step is to integrate what we have learned about short-term and long-term stress transmission processes. For example, although social withdrawal may be an adaptive, short-term coping response for both the individual and the family, over time, repeated instances of withdrawal may corrode feelings of closeness and lead to feelings of resentment and negative interactions (Repetti & Wood, 1997b). Our review also suggests a need to clearly distinguish between objective job characteristics and the individual's subjective experience of those characteristics. Although the two are obviously related, global self-reports of "stress" or feelings of role overload and role conflict should not be confused with specific job characteristics that are presumed to be stressful, such as poor supervision, a negative so* cial climate, or overloads at work. Other research suggests that a high level of control offers workers an opportunity to cope with occupational stressors such as work overload, with benefits for the individual's health (Karásek & Theorell, 1990; Repetti, 1993; Schnall, Schwartz, Landsbergis, Warren, & Pickering, 1998). The simultaneous study of both job demands and job control may allow the theoretical models and empirical findings from work socialization studies, which often assess the effects of autonomy at work, to be integrated into research on the effects of job pressures and demands. Finally, we need to identify key moderating variables that shape the process by which stress is transmitted.
Multiple Roles Perspectives in Work-Family Research
An ongoing theme in the work-family research has been the implications of managing the multiple roles of worker, spouse, and parent for individuals' mental health and the quality of their family relationships. White and Rogers (current issue) point out that, in light of men's declining wages, women's increased employment often has allowed families to maintain their standard of living. These changes, however, call into question the gendered ideology of family life that so often ascribes breadwinning to men (Coltrane, 1996; Deutsch, 1999). Some research has revealed that the demands of multiple roles have the potential to increase stress levels and undermine well-being (O'Neil & Greenberger, 1994), as well as to compromise physical health (Repetti, 1993). Most of
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the recent literature on multiple roles, however, has emphasized the "expansion hypothesis'* (Bar-nett & Baruch, 1985), a view that holds that multiple roles bring rewards—such as "monetary income, heightened self esteem, the power to delegate onerous role obligations, opportunities for social relationships, and challenge" (Barnett, 1999, p. 152)—that have an energizing effect on people. From this perspective, role quality (Barnett, 1994) and the combination of certain roles (Barnett, Marshall, & Pleck, 1992) enhance well-being. The multiple roles literature also has addressed the interactive nature of roles whereby a supportive marital relationship may buffer the negative effects of job stressors (Repetti, 1998). Voydanoff and Donnelly (1999a) found, however, that satisfaction with one's parental role does not serve as a buffer between the stress of managing multiple roles and psychological distress.
Marks and MacDermid (1996) contended that the multiple roles literature has lost sight of the theoretical underpinnings of role theory, which hold that one must examine a total role system rather than treat individual roles as distinct entities separable from the whole. An assumption of some role theorists is that role systems are inherently hierarchical, and thus the problem of juggling roles requires favoring one role over another (Thoits, 1992). In contrast, Marks and MacDermid proposed that although this is how roles may be organized for some, "role balance," where roles are given relatively equal attention and weight, may be optimal for many. This theoretical debate awaits more research to disentangle the ways in which individuals organize their life roles and the implications for individuals and family relationships.
A serious limitation of studies that address multiple roles, whether it be from a balance or strain perspective, is a lack of attention to the connection between role enactment (e.g., the behaviors linked to a role) and role responsibility (e.g., taking on psychological responsibility for a role). A gender perspective challenges researchers to examine how individuals construct and give meaning to their roles, for ultimately it is the meaning attached to role behavior that holds consequences for individual and family functioning (Ferree, 1990). Research on the meaning of the provider role for women and men has consistently found that employment status alone reveals little about the meaning and value of that role for the individual (Hood,  1983; Perry-Jenkins & Crouter,
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1990; Perry-Jenkins, Seery, & Crouter, 1992; Po-tuchek, 1992).
The question of how race may moderate work-family role relationships has been addressed by a few scholars (Broman, 1991; McLoyd, 1993). In a study that explored work and family roles in black families, Broman found that involvement in multiple roles had differential effects on Black women and men. Specifically, married, employed women reported the lowest levels of family life satisfaction, whereas married, employed men reported the highest family satisfaction. In addition, different organization of work and family role responsibilities were related to assessments of family life satisfaction, but not to psychological well-being outcomes. Broman suggested that the usefulness of social role theory may be domain-specific for Blacks, useful in understanding family life satisfaction but not mental health. He and McLoyd argued further that the different historical experiences of Blacks and Whites in the United States have implications not only for differential work and family role configurations as a function of race, but for different associations between role patterns and family and individual outcomes for Blacks and Whites. Greater attention to race and ethnicity as they shape work and family experiences remains an important direction for the field.
New Directions for Research on Multiple Roles
Future research should examine the meaning men and women assign to their roles as parents, workers, and marital partners. One study of the transition to parenthood for working-class, dual-earner couples has shown that in families where both mother and father rank "parent" as their most important role, there is great variation in their definitions of what a parent actually does (Perry-Jenkins, Pierce, Haley, & Goldberg, 1999). More than half of the men reported that providing income was their primary responsibility as a parent, whereas others listed characteristics such as being a role model, nurturing, and spending time with their children. Simon (1997) not only found gendered differences in the meaning that men and women gave to the costs and benefits of certain roles, but also that these different meanings were related to differing degrees of distress.
Research in the multiple roles tradition often views work and family roles as static, despite research that points to the fluid and dynamic nature of many roles. Future work on roles would benefit from a life-course perspective, an approach that
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guides researchers to examine differing work and family trajectories that take shape over time, with attention to the precursors and outcomes of these different paths. New methodological strategies that focus on the dyad as the unit of analysis will make it possible to understand how spouses shape each others' attitudes and behaviors over time, as well as the consequences of those interactions for the marriage and individual psychological functioning (Raudenbush, Brennan, & Barnett, 1995).
The Impact of Families on the Workplace
Despite the continued recognition that work-family relationships are bidirectional, few studies emerged in the past decade that explored how families shape behavior in the workplace. The question of the direction of effects has proven to be a thorny issue in work-family research. Although trained not to use causal language, social scientists tend to think causally and to develop causal theories, even when their data and research designs preclude the possibility of making causal conclusions. One reason why it is particularly challenging to think about causal relationships in research on work and family has to do with selection effects at several levels. First, people tend to select their work on the basis of goals, interests, skills, training, and experience. Evidence for the nonrandom nature of these processes comes from Cooksey, Menaghan, and Jekielek (1997), who found that mothers with low self-esteem and those with early histories of delinquent behavior were subsequently less likely to attain jobs that were high in complexity. Second, individuals have to negotiate some work issues (such as schedules, work hours, and overtime) with their marital partner, creating another layer of selection effects. In a large, qualitative study, Deutsch (1999) described how parents often made conscious (and probably unconscious) decisions about jobs that were unsuitable because of time demands, inadequate income, and inflexibility. In fact, job decisions were often gendered decisions, in large part based on who was seen as responsible for supporting the family, as opposed to the nature of the job. Finally, the workplace also plays a role in selection, hiring some employees and firing others, providing opportunities for some workers and discriminating against others. Researchers can control for some of these preexisting qualities and decisions, but it is impossible to fully anticipate or measure all relevant phenomena. Indeed, one reason why the findings on the impact of short-
term work stress on family relations are so powerful is that those research designs bypass the selection effects problem by utilizing each individual respondent as his or her own "control."
What questions did researchers in the 1990s ask about family-to-work effects? A handful of scholars developed or incorporated (or both developed and incorporated) self-report family-to-work conflict scales that require respondents to assess the ways that their family demands have affected their work-related activities (Gutek, Searle, & Klepa, 1991; Netemeyer, Boles, & McMurrian, 1996). Family-to-work conflict was found to be negatively related to work performance (Frone, Yardley, & Markel, 1997) and positively related to work withdrawal (MacEwen & Barling, 1994).
Some support emerged for the hypothesis that distressing or disruptive family relationships negatively impact workplace productivity and absenteeism. Using cross-sectional data from the National Comorbidity Survey, Forthofer, Markman, Cox, Stanley, & Kessler (1996) found that marital distress was positively, albeit modestly, related to work loss, operationalized as the number of days the employee was unable to work and carry out normal activities. The findings were most robust for men in their first 10 years of marriage.
In one of the only longitudinal studies to examine the effects of family conditions on work, Rogers (1999) found that, as marital discord increased, so too did wives' income because increases in marital discord increased the likelihood that nonemployed wives would enter the labor force. Rogers5 findings may portray some of the early precursors of marital dissolution, or, more optimistically, reveal a process whereby unhappy wives acquire new bargaining power. In a similar vein, Attewell (1999) concluded that, with regard to the relationship between divorce and unemployment, "causation appears to run in both directions" (p. 81); controlling for demographic and occupational characteristics, unemployment increased the likelihood of subsequent divorce and being divorced increased the likelihood of subsequent unemployment.
New Directions for Research on Family-to-Work Effects
More work is needed that examines how family conditions shape work life in terms of both long-term decisions and short-term daily interactions. As a first step, it would be instructive for researchers to test work-to-family and family-to-work hy-
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potheses in the same data set using recursive models. This approach still begs the question of causality. Some of the most exciting possibilities for studying cause and effect lie in intervention programs. In the context of welfare reform, for example, we may be able to piggyback work and family questions on to studies that randomly assign people to jobs or build questions about work into family interventions. Forthofer et al. (1996) noted that interventions designed to decrease marital conflict may have the side benefit of lowering employers' costs due to work loss and absenteeism. This hypothesis is worth pursuing in marital intervention studies with random assignment to experimental and control conditions.
Insights on Work and Family From Policy-Oriented Research
In the early 1990s, a great deal of attention focused on federal and workplace policies as sources of support for working families in the United States. Ferber, O'Farrell, and Allen (1991) reviewed the state of policies and programs for working families and outlined the agenda and challenges for the upcoming decade. In 1993, landmark legislation was passed in the form of the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), which allows for 12 weeks of unpaid leave with job protection for employees having or adopting children or for the care of an ill child, spouse, or parent. Although an important milestone in the area of family policy, the FMLA excludes 95% of employers and 50% of employees (because it applies only to workplaces with 50 or more employees), is of little assistance to part-time, seasonal, or temporary workers, and is unavailable to same-gender couples. Moreover, because this leave time is unpaid, low-income families often cannot take advantage of it (Gerstel & McGonagle, 1999), leading some to argue that the act represents "an emerging class cleavage in workplace family policy" (Estes & Glass, 1996, p. 429). Even in companies with a "family-friendly" image, informal barriers often exist that make it difficult for employees either to take a leave or to take as long a leave as they would like. Fried (1998) discussed the inherent contradiction workers interested in parental leave face in a corporate environment that equates dedication with long work hours. Even in Sweden, a country with a much more generous parental leave policy than that of the United States, informal workplace culture often has made
it difficult for men to take advantage of parental leave (Haas, 1992).
Only a handful of studies have addressed the implications of work-family policies for parental or child well-being. Hyde, Klein, Essex, and Clark (1995) found that short maternity leaves were a risk factor in predicting maternal depression when coupled with another risk factor such as marital concerns. Clark, Hyde, Essex, and Klein (1997) found that mothers with shorter maternity leaves who were either more depressed or who had babies with more difficult temperaments exhibited less positive interactions with their infants compared with mothers with longer leaves.
The question of why the United States continues to have such a half-hearted response to the needs of working families is compelling. In an excellent historical overview of "the limited and uneven policy response" to maternal employment over the past three decades, Pleck (1992) suggested that one explanation centers on many Americans' continued ambivalence about maternal employment. Given the consistency with which social scientists have documented the absence of effects of maternal employment on children, however, our scientific attention must focus on those conditions of employment that hold implications for families, and our policies, in turn, should enhance those conditions that support families and minimize those circumstances that pose risks.
An historical perspective on family policy can provide insights into the forces that shape social change. Burstein and Bricher (1997), in reviewing the development of public policy around issues of work, family, and gender from 1945 through the 1990s, pointed to the importance of understanding how policy actually emerges. Major changes in policy require the conjunction of three processes: (a) defining the problem, (b) developing new solutions, and (c) pressure on Congress (Burstein & Wierzbicki, in press). Rayman and Bookman (1999) highlighted three examples of policy initiatives in the work-family area: (a) The White House Conference on Families during the late 1970s; (b) The Infant Care Leave Project, organized by the Bush Center in Child Development and Social Policy at Yale University in the mid-1980s; and (c) the Carnegie Corporation of New York's effort to underscore the importance of the first 3 years of life. In each case, the initiatives produced increased public awareness but little in terms of dramatic changes in public policy, perhaps reflecting "a lack of national consensus
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about what is the proper role of government in supporting working families'* (Rayman & Bookman, p. 206). If policy changes regarding work and family issues are to occur in the future, family scholars and advocates could benefit from the lessons of history that recommend focus, creativity, and diligence in our efforts. Disseminating research in forms that are accessible and interesting to the public is an essential part of this process.
On another policy front, changes in the American welfare system that took place in the last decade hold important implications for the lives of poor families. The 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act shifted authority for welfare reform from the federal government to state governments. The new legislation, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), requires that able-bodied welfare recipients work after 2 years. This new legislation provides block grants to states and gives them the power to use this money as they deem appropriate, with an important feature being that states are allowed to keep every dollar they save from their reform package. Thus, incentives to cut costs are high. Studies have already begun to document the price that many families pay as a result of this new legislation. Edin and Lein's (1997) work with single mothers highlights the reality that public assistance and low-wage jobs do not provide enough income to cover basic needs. They conclude that the primary problem with the current welfare system is that the kind of jobs these women can attain are low paying, offer little security, and provide few long term opportunities. To make ends meet, many mothers were involved in "off-the-books" work to sustain their families, an aspect of the work-family interface that we know little about. Iverson and Farber (in press) highlight the importance of intergenerational transmission of values regarding work and self-sufficiency in their sample of Black teen mothers and nonparent peers. Their research points to the importance of familial role models, tangible support, direct verbal messages, job training and consultation for poor, young women striving to become financially independent. A number of researchers have raised concerns regarding maternal and child well-being in situations where mothers are in poorly paid, stressful jobs and have not voluntarily chosen to work (Lambert, 1999; Moore & Driscoll, 1997; Parcel & Menaghan, 1997). As this social experiment extends into the next decade, researchers must focus on the short- and long-term outcomes of different types of welfare-to-work initiatives.
Charting New Terrain for the Next Decade
We have woven critiques and recommendations throughout this review. Rather than summarizing those points, we close by highlighting several broad themes that cut across these areas and point the direction for future research. First and foremost, issues of definition and meaning regarding the weighty terms of "work" and "family" must be addressed. Although feminist scholars have challenged the use of these terms in compelling ways (Ferree, 1990; Ishii-Kuntz, 1994; Thome, unpublished data), most research in the 1990s was rooted in notions of the nuclear family and images of routine, full-year, 9-to-5, paid jobs. We will benefit from efforts that question and explore the social constructions of work and family. As Thome suggested, "fruitful topics illuminate social processes that don't necessarily stop at the prespeci-fied boundaries of 'work' and 'family.* " For example, how might kin offer instrumental and emotional support that allows for trade-offs and reciprocity across all domains of life, especially during times of economic and social upheavals? In addition, efforts to reconceptualize "work and family" would benefit greatly from more cross-cultural and comparative studies (Ishii-Kuntz).
Second, we need a more nuanced approach to work and family research, attainable by consistently asking to whom our models apply. Answering this question requires samples that vary in terms of gender, race, ethnicity, class, occupation, and family structure. When we succeed in identifying such diverse samples, a first approach should be to explore whether our models are universal or apply in certain delimited contexts. We need to rethink the common tendency to control statistically for race, class, and other indicators of location in the social structure. Rather, we should think through which combinations of social circumstances are most likely to produce the patterns in which we are interested. In attending to social circumstances, we also should take into account how social and historical time shapes the meaning we give to work and family issues.
Sometimes a strategic first step to understanding the complexity of work and family dynamics is to focus on an exemplar occupation, as in Re-petti's study of air traffic controllers, who work in a high-stress occupation likely to produce daily fluctuations in challenges and demands. After identifying the processes of interest in a specific, theoretically relevant occupation, we then need to
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broaden our occupational sampling to specify the conditions under which the linkages of interest are evident.
A third, related direction emphasizes embracing complexity. Some of the most interesting research in the 1990s examined interaction effects, how, for example, occupational complexity in combination with family circumstances shapes the quality of the home environment parents provide for their children. We need to press forward in this direction by building better measures of family processes, family relationships, and employed adults' interpretations and constructions of their work and family roles into studies of occupational conditions.
We have already stressed the ubiquitous problem of selection effects in work and family research. To date, however, most research in the area has focused on working parents themselves. We need to know far more about child effects and their contributions to work and family research. To what extent do parents make work decisions on the basis of what their children are like or what they think their children need? Do child effects operate in the same ways for mothers versus fathers?
Finally, the field would benefit greatly from experimental research designs. Given the attention to workplace policies and conditions in the past decade, the next decade may bring actual change and innovation on the work front. We must be prepared to study these social experiments as they unfold, for it is these types of experimental manipulations that will allow us to pinpoint critical aspects of work that can enhance family life while giving us a handle on the selection effects so pervasive in work and family research.
It is our hope that we will see in the next decade inventive, interdisciplinary research that illuminates the complex processes linking these social settings. The research themes highlighted in this review come from rich disciplinary traditions, each with unique strengths and weaknesses. Future research that integrates the strengths of both a work socialization perspective, with its careful attention to work conditions, and a developmental perspective, with its wealth of knowledge regarding adult and child development and family relationships, would greatly enhance our knowledge base. Moreover, methodological and conceptual advances in the work stress and multiple roles literatures provide insights into the objective and subjective mediators that bridge the relationship between work and family. Finally, heeding Thome's
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(unpublished data) cautions, we must be careful to avoid reifying static, bounded concepts of "work" and "family" in research. Research will better reflect life when our images of work and family issues shift from the confines of black boxes linked by arrows, to more complex, colorful imagery that blurs boundaries and is shaded by multiple layers of social context. In the next decade, researchers in the work and family field, building on its strong multidisciplinary foundation, should forge integrative theories and research designs that mirror the realities and complexities of our work and family lives.
Note
The authors wish to express their appreciation to Fran-cine Deutsch, Naomi Gerstel, and Susan McHale for their constructive comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Preparation of this manuscript was supported by a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH, R29-MH56777) to the first author, a grant from NIMH (R29-48593) to the second author, and grants from the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development (R01-HD29409 and R01-HD32336) to the third author.
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