Wellbeing and the community, work & family interface

There has been a substantial growth in academic interest in how the wellbeing of people is affected by community, work and family and their intersections. This integrated perspective on wellbeing is illustrated, for example, by the large number of publications in Community, Work & Family on the wellbeing of working parents. Wellbeing can be considered as a holistic and multidimensional concept reflecting people’s experiences of their quality of life, including both objective (such as income, standard of living, physical health) and subjective elements (such as work-life balance satisfaction, social relatedness) (Beham et al., 2006).

Reflecting on the development of the journal since its foundation in 2000, the founding editors of Community, Work & Family Carolyn Kagan and Suzan Lewis pointed out that researchers increasingly acknowledge the intersections between community, work and family. Moreover, they highlighted that rapid global changes such as enhanced communication technologies, the transformation to a knowledge-based society, increasing globalization, changing expectations of when and where work is done, changing employment and family relations, and the increasing need for informal care in the aging society affect these interconnections (Kagan & Lewis, 2010). The current global COVID-19 pandemic is a striking example of how global changes can affect communities, work and family and people’s wellbeing. They also noted that despite these global and rapid changes, there are also areas where change is limited and inequality according to gender, social class and racial/ethnic background remains a persistent reality. In order to enhance equality and safeguard the wellbeing of families and workers, it is important to investigate and explore how social and global changes are affecting – and are affected by – community, work and family across different contexts. This requires taking a multidisciplinary approach and having a perspective that extends beyond Western industrialized countries.

Reflecting on our time as editors of Community, Work & Family and the manuscripts published in the journal during the last decade (2010–2020), we find that a majority of the studies with wellbeing as an essential element tend to focus on the wellbeing of working parents in developed countries – as is the case in other journals (French & Johnson, 2016). When studying working parents, most scholars tend to focus on dual-earner heterosexual couples or working mothers. However, we have also witnessed a substantial growth of papers on fathers and fatherhood in Community, Work & Family (see for instance, Braun et al., 2011; 2019; Mooney et al., 2013; Norman et al., 2014; Singh Gill, 2020), responding to the call of the founding editors that we need more knowledge ‘on the conditions under which men can and do change in relation to the work-family-community interface’ (Kagan & Lewis, 2010, p. 1). In the past 10 years, scholars have paid a lot of attention to gender differences and processes, and increasingly how gender intersects with other dimensions of diversity, such as social class, race, ethnicity and immigration background (see for example Jaga et al., 2018; Singh Gill, 2020). In addition, there has been a growing number of papers on working parents caring for children or young people with a disability between 2010 and 2020. The wellbeing of singles, couples without children, individuals that identify as LGTBQ and their partners and families, and those workers that provide informal care have received less attention (notable exceptions are Innstrand et al., 2010; Languilaire & Carey, 2017). In light of the significant shifts occurring in the world of work and the global economy, we need to better understand the work, family and community circumstances that influence the wellbeing of workers other than those who have been a central focus of the work, family and community literature – higher educated white, middle class employees with a regular contract living and working in the Global North. Though research on the influence of work, family and community on the wellbeing of lower-wage workers, the self-employed, temporary workers, and hourly workers has increased, the number of studies is still relatively limited. Community, Work & Family appears to be the home to publish research on marginalized and understudied groups, some of which include sex workers, homeless people, hourly workers, farm workers and workers from underdeveloped countries. Placing an emphasis on the study of these diverse working populations will continue to illuminate the diversity of experiences within and across contexts.

The series of papers in this special issue illustrate the varying perspectives on the effects of community, work and family and its interfaces on workers’ wellbeing. While the studies reported in these papers look at different groups of workers and aspects of wellbeing, evident across all studies is that wellbeing cannot be understood from one field or life domain, community, work or family, and without taking different layers of context into account: the local, the wider society and the global context.

The special issue opens with an examination of how ‘front-line’ workers exposed to a range of intense work demands navigate their daily work and non-work lives. Drawing on the work-home resources model (Ten Brummelhuis & Bakker, 2012), Chan, Fan and Snell (this issue) aim to understand child protective workers’ work-life experiences by exploring how the contextual demands from work domains (e.g. repeated exposure to trauma, abuse, violence) and non-work domains deplete an individual’s well-being and ultimately heighten work-to-home or home-to-work conflict. They also explore the ways contextual resources from work and from non-work environments foster personal resources and thereby facilitate ease in managing work-life experiences. This interesting qualitative study found that the unique nature of child protection work requires intense time pressure, high workloads, and unpredictable work hours. These factors along with a lack of adequate training and support of workers resulted in high levels of stress and burnout, psychological work-related rumination and a negative impact on their non-work life. Adequate work resources, professional expertise and job satisfaction buffered these ill-effects of the job. Based on study results, Chan and colleagues argue for organizational-level interventions that focus on specific combinations of contextual demands and resources that work together to minimize the adverse effect on worker health.

The second paper in this special issue examines the experiences of another specific worker population – tenure track faculty. In an effort to understand factors that contribute to faculty’s experiences of work-life conflict, Branch, Chapman and Gomez (this issue) use autoethnographic methods to detail the time spent engaged in institutional, spousal, parental, and personal activities and assess the interplay that each of these demands have on the amount and quality of time that tenure-track faculty spend on each demand. Institutional demands accounted for most of participants’ time, while the least amount of time was spent engaged in spousal and personal activities. The quality of time in each of these roles was more likely to be logistical in nature, rather than relational. This was especially true for parental and spousal roles. The authors encourage future research into the differing effects that quality of time in each role has on experiences of work-life conflict.

The next two papers focus on the work-life experiences of working couples, although from different perspectives. One paper explores work-family guilt among mothers and fathers and the other examines the effect of couple’s work role congruency on women’s mental health. Aarntzen, Van der Lippe, Steenbergen and Derks (this issue) seek to understand whether working mothers experience more work-family guilt than working fathers and how this relates to gender role beliefs. Analyses of the European Social Workforce Survey found that both parents experience work-family guilt when they work more than full-time. Results also reveal an interesting interaction effect. Working longer hours increased work-family guilt among couples with more egalitarian beliefs but working longer was not related to work-family guilt in parents with more traditional gender role beliefs. Organizational and country-level results are equally as compelling and raise several questions about the impact of gender role ideology on parental work-family guilt and implications for organizations and policy makers.

The other unique study of dual-earner couples examines the work arrangements of couples who work together on the family farm. Swendener (this issue), argues that the social context of farm family life is relevant to understanding couples’ work-family arrangements and related health matters. Cross-sectional data from 1475 farm families was used to determine whether women who perceive incongruence in their own and their partner’s work arrangement will have high levels of depressive symptoms, and whether mastery and satisfaction with farm life would mediate the relationship between incongruence and women’s depressive symptoms. Results from the multivariate analyses suggest that subjective experiences of couples’ work arrangements have a significant effect on women’s mental health.

The next article in this special issue employs a systematic review to discern what is known about the work-family experiences of immigrant workers in the United States. After a thorough review of the literature, Lin and Lin (this issue) identified only six articles that fit the review criteria. Analyses of these six articles revealed four primary factors that were associated with work-family conflict among U.S. immigrant workers: work-domain factors, family-domain factors, health outcomes, and immigration and acculturation and gender roles. Immigration and acculturation into US society shaped immigrants’ work-family experiences in distinct ways that have received limited attention in the work-family literature.

The article of De Guzman Chorny, Raub, Earle and Heymann (this issue) examines the eligibility for paid leave benefits in OECD countries. Seeking to understand the variation of eligibility requirements across countries, De Guzman Chorny et al. used data from national household surveys from 34 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to identify which workers were less likely to be eligible for paid leave due to tenure requirements. Although many OECD countries do not have specific tenure eligibility requirements, across multiple types of paid family and medical leave, younger workers (aged 20–29) were less likely to have access to paid leave than older workers. The authors speculate that younger workers have less access to paid leave because they may be more likely than their older counterparts to work part-time, have been unemployed or engaged in intermittent or seasonal work.

The final piece in this special issue is written by the two editors of this special issue and reflects on the impact of the measures taken to slow down the COVID-19 pandemic, such as lockdowns and social distancing, on the wellbeing of workers. The authors take a global perspective and provide an overview of the economic support provided by governments across the world to protect workers from the economic consequences of measures taken in the attempt to contain the COVID-19 pandemic. They also discuss how communities, work and families are affected by the pandemic and point out the emerging of new social inequalities and the deepening of existing inequalities related to gender, class and across societies.

We thank the editors and the editorial board for creating a special issue on workers’ wellbeing in honor of our tenure as editors of Community, Work & Family. As we live and work during a global pandemic as working women who are part of families and communities, we continue to understand how the drastic and prolonged changes in our social relationships, ways of working, family life, and involvement in communities have impacted our wellbeing – as well as those in our communities. In the months and years to come, we encourage further research into the impact of the pandemic on worker wellbeing, both from an economic perspective as well as from social relatedness perspective, ensuring studies are inclusive of the broad range of workers represented in labor markets across the globe.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributors

Laura den Dulk, PhD, is Professor of public administration in Employment, Organization and Work-Life Issues at Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Her research interests focus on the work-life interface, workplace practices and social policies in different national contexts. She is former editor of Community, Work & Family.

Jennifer E. Swanberg, PhD, is professor of occupational therapy in the College of Health and Wellness, at Johnson & Wales University. She is an internationally recognized interdisciplinary scholar dedicated to improving the quality of work-life and employee well-being among vulnerable working populations through research, workplace, and policy interventions. Dr. Swanberg has a Ph.D. in Social Policy and a Masters in Management of Human Services, both from the Heller School of Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University, and a B.S. in Occupational Therapy from the University of New Hampshire. She is former editor of Community, Work & Family.