WorkFamily Research Soon to Get Boost in Federal Funding
Dianne Brown Maranto
APA Science Directorate
National Institutes of Health (NIH) offices (The National Institute for Child Health and Human Development [NICHD] and the Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research [OBSSR]), the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH, from the Centers for Disease Control), the Child Care Bureau of the Administration for Children and Families (ACF), and the Maryland Population Research Center are collaborating with the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to assess the state of the science in workfamily, health, and well-being research to begin to carve out an agenda for future efforts that will build upon existing knowledge.
NICHD and other NIH Institutes have funded workfamily research in the past, but much of this work has been funded in response to general calls for research instead of to a specific initiative focused squarely on work, family, and health research. According to Lynne Casper, NICHDs director of this program,
The time has come to build a program specifically targeted at this area of research. We are holding a conference in June 2003 to launch the new work, family, health, and well-being initiative. This conference will bring together researchers from a variety of disciplines to help identify theories, methodologies, and constructs that will help to inform a comprehensive model for future
research.1
1The conference had not yet occurred when this article was written in April 2003.
Another future conference will examine current workplace policies and practices, state and federal laws pertaining to work, and employees notions about workplace policies and programs. This conference will also foster partnerships between employers and researchers. Both conferences will help to shape a future research agenda and funding priorities in this area.
In addition to the previously mentioned NIH research, the military, and some funding from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), workfamily research has had a major benefactor in recent years in the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Kathleen Christensen, a former professor of environmental psychology, developed Sloans Workplace, Workforce and Working Families program in 1994. Since then, they have sponsored 150 grants totaling over 40 million dollars. Sloans program is organized around three goals: (a) understanding the structure of the workplace and how it can be rethought to meet the varied needs of American workers; (b) understanding the daily lives of working families and the issues they face; and (c) promoting public understanding of working families through popular books, radio, and television. The first and second goals represent the research foci of Sloans centers and grantees, and the third represents a newer, more applied focus of the foundation.
After several years of workplace research, Christensen recognized that many of the issues confronting families and work center around the fact that although the demographics and economic needs of the workforce have changed greatly, the setting and demands of the workplace have not.
A workplace that requires, full-time, full-year work, with minimal opportunities for time off or for flexible career paths, subverts the needs of many in todays diverse workforce. The lack of career paths that mirror life cycles makes it difficult for many, including dual-earner working parents, older workers, and single parents, to live the lives they would like. Many do not want to work full time, full year, year in and year out, on a rigid lock step career path for their entire lives. But right now they have little choice. The rigidity of the workplace is profoundly mismatched with the needs of the changing workforce.
She has worked to shape Sloans research agenda accordingly, with new projects examining career ladders for dual earner families and examining workplace restructuring in specific industries. While the Sloan Foundation continues to support important research on working families and the issues they face, We have also developed the workplace-workforce mismatch formulation to support action-oriented research that identifies innovative workplace ideas and practices that can form the genesis of a movement towards a more flexible and productive workplace that will be good for children, good for society, and good for business in the future.
With new sources of funding on the way, I-O psychologists may have more opportunities to be active in this area of research. Although multidisciplinary teams are common, the area seems to be dominated by sociologists and labor economists.
Debra Major, associate professor at Old Dominion University, has been researching the effects of child health on working parents and is enthusiastic about increased funding in this area. Childrens health is a largely overlooked business concern, and constraints on working parents go unrecognized in the child health arena. This initiative will legitimize these areas of study and provide researchers across disciplines with the resources to pursue them.
Leslie Hammer, associate professor at Portland State University, has conducted Sloan-funded research and feels that I-O psychologists have a valuable perspective to offer. Our research on working families caring for both children and parents provides a glimpse of the dynamics, both positive and negative, that occur among dual-earner couples who are managing multiple family and work role demands simultaneously.
Tammy Allen, associate professor at the University of South Florida, has conducted research on family-supportive workplace issues and workfamily conflict. This is an exciting opportunity for industrial-organizational psychologists to contribute to an important research agenda. Our training in understanding both organizational and individual well-being provides an ideal foundation for conducting research on the intersection of work and family roles.
Diane Halpern, APAs president-elect, will undoubtedly bring more visibility to this area of research. Placing a high value on influencing public policy, Halpern sees the workfamily balance issue as a natural for science to inform policy:
The world of work is still organized for the fictional family that lived in the world of black-and-white television in the 1950s. There are few real families with a dedicated company man, stay-at-home wife to care for the children or elderly parents, and two children who apparently never needed much care or suffer from serious illnesses. We need a new model of workone that works for employers and working families, and psychologists are in a position to do the research to inform that new model.
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