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Can Work-Life Balance Policies Foster Happiness Within the Family? A Comparison of Traditional Versus New Family Arrangements

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Advances in Happiness Research

Part of the book series: Creative Economy ((CRE))

Abstract

This chapter investigates the extent to which self-reported well-being, as measured by life satisfaction, for parents living in traditional (coupled mothers and fathers with dependant children) and new family arrangements (lone mothers and fathers) is affected by the use of work-life balance arrangements (WLB, henceforth) (formal and informal) as a coping strategy with the time pressures derived from their labour market responsibilities.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The countries are: Austria (AT), Belgium (BE), Bulgaria (BG), Cyprus (CY), Czech Republic (CZ), Germany (DE), Denmark (DK), Estonia (EE), Spain (ES), Finland (FI), France (FR), Greece (GR), Croatia (HR), Hungary (HU), Ireland (IE), Iceland (IS), Italy (IT), Lithuania (LT), Luxembourg (LU), Latvia (LV), Montenegro (ME), Macedonia (MK), Malta (MT), Netherlands (NL), Poland (PL), Portugal (PT), Romania (RO), Serbia (RS), Sweden (SE), Slovenia (SI), Slovakia (SK), Turkey (TR), United Kingdom (UK), Kosovo (XK).

  2. 2.

    Multilevel analysis is especially suited to introduce country-level variables to investigate their impact on life satisfaction and also (through cross-level interactions) to analyse whether the impact of individual-level variables on life satisfaction varies across certain country-level characteristics. Yet, for this chapter I do not consider the role of country-level characteristics directly. Although, variations in self-reported childcare arrangements by respondents have surely to do with how accessible these arrangements are in each country through public policies.

  3. 3.

    Unfortunately, given the reduced sample size for the multivariate analysis in the next section formal childcare arrangements have to be merged with informal childcare arrangements into a single category for both childcare arrangements.

  4. 4.

    Given the sample size it is not possible to distinguish further by the age of children. In any case, 0–12 years old is traditionally regarded, in research on childcare arrangements, as the age of dependant children.

  5. 5.

    For the sake of simplicity to present the results in this descriptive section, given the large number of countries analysed, here I use the self-reported hours of work in its continuous format instead of the categorical variable used in the multivariate analysis in the next section.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociological Studies Elmfield, The University of Sheffield, Northumberland Road, Sheffield, S10 2TU, UK

    Álvaro Martínez-Pérez

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  1. Álvaro Martínez-Pérez
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Correspondence to Álvaro Martínez-Pérez .

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  1. Faculty of Economics, Doshisha University Faculty of Economics, Kyoto, Kyoto, Japan

    Toshiaki Tachibanaki

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Martínez-Pérez, Á. (2016). Can Work-Life Balance Policies Foster Happiness Within the Family? A Comparison of Traditional Versus New Family Arrangements. In: Tachibanaki, T. (eds) Advances in Happiness Research. Creative Economy. Springer, Tokyo. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-4-431-55753-1_15

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