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Reported Levels of Time-based and Strain-based Conflict Between Work and Family Roles in Europe: A Multilevel Approach

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Abstract

What are the determinants of the subjective experience of conflict between work and family roles among dual-earner couples in Europe? Taking a demands-and-resources approach, this study investigates the individual and macro-level factors that generate perceptions of negative spill-over from work to family. Comparative survey data for 23 countries come from Round 2 of the European Social Survey. The empirical results support theoretical arguments for a conceptual distinction between time- and strain-based work-family conflicts. The findings also reveal important sex differences in the ways that perceptions of conflict are generated. Moreover, the results from multilevel analyses suggest that the experience of work-family conflict among dual-earner couples is only weakly moderated by institutional or cultural effects.

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Notes

  1. For details on data, see www.europeansocialsurvey.org.

  2. The transformation of the two outcome measures into standard normal scores allows us to treat the responses as if they were continuously distributed, and to use linear multilevel estimates.

  3. This is done using the NSCOres command in MLwiN, which assigns expected values from the standard normal distribution according to the ranks of the original scores in the form of Normal Equivalent Deviates (NED).

  4. We have also run single-level models with dummy codes representing group-membership (country fixed effects) to account for non-independence in the data (instead of random intercepts). These models yield very similar results regarding the effects of individual-level predictors (in Models 1 and 2) and of (residual) country-effects.

  5. The variance partitioning coefficient is computed from the estimated variance parameters. For instance, for women, it amounts to 0.03/(0.03 + 0.78) = 0.04 for TBC, suggesting that 4% of the variance is located at the country-level. For men, it amounts to 0.02/(0.02 + 0.80) = 0.02 for TBC.

  6. Among women we find significantly higher levels of TBC and SBC than on country-average in Finland, Wallonia and Slovakia, and lower levels of TBC and SBC in Portugal and Ireland. Among men, we find significantly higher levels of TBC in the UK and Finland, and lower levels of TBC and SBC in Portugal.

  7. Controlling only for the number of working hours (and not the full set of individual level controls as in Table 2), the coefficients for ‘female’ change to .14*** (TBC) and .25*** (SBC, not shown).

  8. For instance, we find no significant effect of time-autonomy, which may be explained by the fact that the mere possibility to control starting and finishing times is a low level of time-autonomy when compared to more advanced flexi-time schemes that permit workers to take full days or even longer periods of time off to compensate for accumulated credit hours (time accounts).

  9. Firm-size effects may be related to the public/private divide. Yet, this cannot be tested as the ESS2e03 does not include an indicator for the sector of employment.

  10. Given that we control for the number of hours spent in formal work, additional TBC due to economic hardship may result from time-demands that are not covered in this survey, i.e. informal work as a survival strategy, especially in the less affluent countries of Central and Eastern Europe.

  11. When we exclude the measure of income insufficiency from Model 1 (Pooled), the effect of income rank is reduced from .06*** to .04** and the DIC increases to 19,150, indicating a worse model fit.

  12. The problem of sample selection may arise, given that our outcome is observed only for people who are presently employed. This would lead to estimation bias in the event that the mechanism through which people select into our sample depends on unobservables that correlate with the model errors. In an attempt to test for sample selection bias, we computed an inverse Mills ratio from a probit model of labour market participation with past experience of unemployment as an instrument that affects the participation decision but is not related to the experience of conflict. The results suggest that sample selection does not bias our results, either in the female or the male sample.

  13. The residual country-effects are: Among women, higher levels of conflict than on average are reported in Wallonia, France (TBC and SBC) and Denmark (SBC), while lower levels of conflict are reported in Portugal, Hungary (TBC and SBC) and Slovenia (SBC). Also among men, we find below-average levels of TBC and SBC in Portugal and Slovenia.

  14. These two macro-level variables correlate at r = −0.07.

  15. With the data at hand (25 country-level units), we are severely constrained in the attempt to investigate potential cross-country differences in how work-family conflict is generated. This would be an important avenue for future research, i.e. to test potential mediating effects of institutional/cultural conditions on individual-level mechanisms of conflict creation.

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Acknowledgments

This paper was produced as part of the Economic Change, Quality of Life and Social Cohesion (EQUALSOC) Network of Excellence, funded by the European Commission (DG Research) as part of the Sixth Framework Programme. See editors’ introduction for further details. Earlier versions of this article have been presented at the EqualSoc Workshop ‘Reconciling Work and Family Life’, held on 18–19 October 2007 at the Economic and Social Research Institute in Dublin and at the CINEFOGO Workshop ‘Work-Life Balance in Europe: possibilities and constraints’, Plovdiv, Bulgaria, 4–5 February 2008. I am grateful to Javier Polavieja and Fran McGinnity as well as to the other workshop participants for their most helpful comments. Many thanks also to the two anonymous referees, for their insightful suggestions.

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  1. Institute of Sociology and Social Research, Vienna University of Economics, Augasse 2-6, 1090, Vienna, Austria

    Nadia Steiber

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Correspondence to Nadia Steiber.

Appendix 1

Appendix 1

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Table 4 Description of model, outcome measures and predictors
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Steiber, N. Reported Levels of Time-based and Strain-based Conflict Between Work and Family Roles in Europe: A Multilevel Approach. Soc Indic Res 93, 469–488 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-008-9436-z

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