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Conflict Between Work and Family: An Investigation of Four Policy Measures

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Abstract

Welfare states enact a range of policies aimed at reducing work-family conflict. While welfare state policies have been assessed at the macro-level and work-family conflict at the individual-level, few studies have simultaneously addressed these relationships in a cross-national multi-level model. This study addresses this void by assessing the relationship between work-family and family-work conflict and family-friendly policies in 10 countries. Applying a unique multi-level data set that couples country-level policy data with individual-level data (N = 7,895) from the 2002 International Social Survey Programme, the author analyzes the relationship between work-family and family-work conflict and four specific policy measures: family leave, work scheduling, school scheduling, and early childhood education and care. The results demonstrate that mothers and fathers report less family-work and mothers less work-family conflict in countries with more expansive family leave policies. Also, in countries with longer school schedules mothers report less and women without children more work-family conflict.

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Notes

  1. Although limiting the sample to only respondents who are currently working and have children would be valuable, the sample size of working parents is too small to analyze at multiple levels.

  2. The country-level sample size is relatively small (n = 10) which limits the estimation of the variance components. Specifically, including the error term partitions the variance across countries and policy environments. Estimating the models with fixed effects (error term is dropped) tests whether parents are significantly different than nonparents for the entire sample (not varying by country) and whether this effect varies by policy environment. Estimating these as fixed effects reflect a limitation of the data. Specifically, collecting the rich country-level data included in this study is a challenge as the data is incomplete for many of the world’s countries. Thus, complete data across a range of family-responsive policy measures is only collected for a handful of countries. For HLM models, the small sample size at level-2 poses some limitations in estimating the variance. For these reasons, the error term is dropped. However, what is lost in sample size is gained in the detail of the policy measures applied here.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, University of Hawaii, Hilo, 200 W. Kawili Street, Hilo, HI, 96720, USA

    Leah Ruppanner

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  1. Leah Ruppanner
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Correspondence to Leah Ruppanner.

Appendix

Appendix

See Table 5.

Table 5 Descriptive statistics for level-1 variables (2002 ISSP)
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Ruppanner, L. Conflict Between Work and Family: An Investigation of Four Policy Measures. Soc Indic Res 110, 327–347 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-011-9933-3

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