Parents of adolescents often feel like it is hard to carry out their obligations at work, while at the same time attending to matters at home. As a result of this work-family conflict, a parent may experience low morale at work, stress, and depression, all of which have profound effects on their work engagement and productivity. Such tension between work and family may potentially impact the home environment as well, including negative effects on how adolescent children in the family think, feel, and behave. However, we know little about these effects, and also whether a negative home environment may have similarly negative effects on parents at work. Our project seeks to study work-family conflict and its effects on the home environment (and vice versa) using controlled laboratory methods, and methods that allow for the study of these factors in "real-life" outside of the laboratory. By understanding the ways in which work-family conflict and the home environment influence each other, we may gain a better understanding of how to improve functioning in both work and home domain, and thus increase parents' work engagement and productivity.
Many employees in the U.S. experience high demands to fulfill obligations both at work and at home (Galinsky et al. 2009). The incompatibility of heightened pressure from both work and home is referred to as work-family conflict (Greenhaus & Beutell, 1985), high levels of which place employees at increased risk for a host of poor work and psychosocial outcomes (e.g., job dissatisfaction, turnover, depression; Allen, 2012). Moreover, to the extent that child care poses demands in the family domain (Bianchi & Milkie, 2010), the children of employees are important stakeholders in the work-family interface. Yet, the role of employees? children in absorbing the impact or being a source of work-family conflict has received scant attention. Such issues are particularly important to address in families with adolescents. Specifically, work-family conflict creates contexts in which parents have fewer resources or time to monitor their adolescents' whereabouts and activities, likely placing adolescents at high risk for poor psychosocial outcomes (Smetana, 2008). In fact, relative to younger children, adolescents are more likely to display problem behaviors (e.g., depression and substance abuse) that increase parent-adolescent conflict, which may affect parents' time and energy at work. Thus, we propose to address research questions within families who have adolescent children. Specifically, we propose two studies that test both directions of a mediation model informed by the spillover hypothesis of life stressors (Staines, 1980). Based on prior work indicating that parent-adolescent conflict evidences reciprocal relations with children's psychosocial adjustment (Burt et al., 2005), we propose that the reciprocal relations between work-family conflict and adolescent psychosocial maladjustment are mediated by parent-adolescent conflict. Further, our team members have training in not only diverse social science disciplines, but also diverse research settings. Accordingly, we propose two studies that test the model described previously in both field and laboratory settings, allowing each study's strengths to address the limitations of the other study. First, we will test both directions of the above-mentioned mediation model using daily diaries, completed by both parents and adolescents, conducted over a two-week period to measure work-family conflict, parent-adolescent conflict, parental work functioning, and adolescent psychosocial functioning. Second, we will test the same theoretical model using a laboratory design. Specifically, we will recruit family dyads with one full-time working parent and one adolescent for a laboratory study. We will randomly assign each full-time working parent and adolescent dyad to one of three levels of the independent variable: (a) task induction of parental work stress and a low-stress condition for the adolescent, (b) task induction of adolescent psychosocial stress and a low-stress condition for the parent, and (c) both parent and adolescent assigned to a low-stress condition. Next, we will administer a controlled task meant to reflect parent-adolescent conflict (i.e., mediator variable), and we will objectively assess parent and adolescent physiological flexibility (i.e., an index of emotional dysregulation) during this task. We then will administer performance-based tasks of parental work functioning and adolescent psychosocial functioning to test the impact of parent-adolescent conflict on these domains, as well as the cross-domain, indirect impacts of parental work stress and adolescent psychosocial stress. The proposed project promises to improve our basic understanding of the spillover between parents? work experiences and non-work family life.
