Abstract
Amid the rising prevalence of working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic, scholarly interest in the effects of working from home on the fit between work and family life has regained momentum. However, little is known about whether these effects depend on workers’ role salience levels. This study examines the association between the frequency of working from home and two types of work–family conflict: (a) work-to-family conflict (WTFC) and (b) family-to-work conflict (FTWC). We also examine whether these associations are moderated by the salience workers assign to their work and family roles, as well as by workers’ gender and parenting status. To explore these issues, we apply linear regression analyses to data from 4067 employees in Wave 12 (2019���2020) of the German Family Panel Survey. Results show that working from home more frequently is generally associated with both higher WTFC and FTWC for women but not for men. However, among fathers, we found a significant association between working from home and higher WTFC. A moderated association by role salience, where higher work-role salience reduced the positive effect of working from home on FTWC, also only emerged among women. These results suggest that the link between working from home and the fit between one’s work and family is heterogenous: it varies not only by gender and parenthood status, but also partly by the importance workers assign to their various life roles.
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Notes
We only use wave 12 as the questions on role salience were only included in this wave. While data collection for wave 12 began by means of face-to-face (CAPI) interviews, these were replaced by telephone interviews (CATI) in Spring 2020 due to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Thus, in supplementary analyses, we added a dummy variable for survey mode to capture this change in data collection in our full regression analyses. 80% of our sample used CAPI and 20% used CATI as their interview mode. The results showed that whereas those with CAPI mode reported higher levels of WTFC and FTWC than those using the CATI mode, adding this dummy variable does not change the main findings.
The share of missing values on all the variables we used ranged from 0.1% to around 2%, with the exception of the income variable, which had around 7% missing cases. Therefore, we only imputed the income variable, using the average income to impute the missing cases. We also added a dummy variable for respondents who were missing information on income. For all the other variables, we performed listwise deletion.
We compared our final analytic sample with the sample from the first wave of pairfam. Results show that the sample from wave 1 had lower education, less income, a lower percentage of workers in high-skilled occupations, and fewer respondents with employed partners. On the other hand, the sample from wave 1 had more respondents with a preschool child and more respondents with non-employed partners. We believe these results can be explained by the fact that our analytic sample is older than the wave 1 sample. However, the differences between the two samples are generally minor and range between 4% points (the share of those with low education) and 9% points (the share of those with a preschool child in the household). We account for these differences by including these characteristics as control variables in the regression models.
The alternative measure was created using the following items: "Now think about your job and family. To what extent do the following statements apply to you? (1) Most of the important things that happen in my life are related to my job. (2) Most of my interests revolve around my family. (3) Others see me as a family person. (4) Most of my interests revolve around my job. (5) Most of the important things that happen in my life are related to my family. (6) Others see me as a career person." The answer categories range from 1 = completely disagree to 5 = completely agree. The first, fourth, and sixth items were averaged to create a scale for work-role salience. The second, third, and fifth items were averaged to create a scale for family-role salience. Then, we combined both scales into a categorical measure with four categories: dual high salience (i.e., those with high levels of work- and family-role salience), dual low salience (i.e., those with low levels of work- and family-role salience), predominant work role (i.e., those with high levels of work-role salience and low levels of family-role salience), and predominant family role (i.e., those with high levels of family-role salience and low levels of work-role salience). These categories are consistent with prior research (Erdogan et al., 2021). High work-role or family-role salience is denoted for those who are in the 75th or higher percentile, i.e., those who score at least 3 for work-role salience and 4 for family-role salience.
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Yucel, D., Laß, I. Working From Home and Work–Family Conflict: The Importance of Role Salience. Soc Indic Res 172, 947–983 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-024-03337-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-024-03337-4