Bridging between academia and the workplace: lessons learned about translational research on work-family balance

ABSTRACT

Balancing work and family is a continuous and growing challenge, requiring carefully chosen coping strategies. In spite of the growing amount of research on work-family balance, successful, long term solutions are still not readily available to most workers who are trying to cope with the tensions involved in fulfilling both work and family roles. One possible explanation for this lack of translation of research findings in applied settings may lie in how we do work-family research. The present research note presents translational research as a solution to bridge academia and the workplace. More specifically, it shares our experience of a participatory approach to translational research that was adopted in an interdisciplinary research project on work-family balancing strategies. The main objective of this research note is to provide an example of how translational research was carried out in this kind of community-initiated study, and how this approach can facilitate short-term, concrete applications of the knowledge gained from and with the research partners.

RÉSUMÉ

Équilibrer le travail et la famille est un défi continu et croissant, qui nécessite des stratégies de conciliation soigneusement choisies. Malgré le nombre grandissant de recherches sur la conciliation travail-famille, les solutions efficaces à long terme demeurent difficilement accessibles à une majorité de travailleuses.eurs qui tentent de gérer les tensions inhérentes à la réalisation simultanées de leur rôle professionnel et familiale. Une explication possible au manque de transfert des résultats de recherche vers les milieux appliqués réside possiblement en la façon dont la recherche sur la conciliation travail-famille est réalisée. La présente note de recherche expose la recherche translationnelle comme une solution permettant de créer un pont entre le monde universitaire et les milieux de travail. Plus précisément, cette note partage notre expérience d’une approche participative de la recherche translationnelle qui a été adoptée dans un projet de recherche interdisciplinaire sur les stratégies d’équilibre travail-famille. L’objectif principal de cette note de recherche est de fournir un exemple de la manière dont la recherche translationnelle a été réalisée dans une étude initiée par la communauté et comment cette approche peut faciliter des applications concrètes à court terme des connaissances acquises sur et avec les partenaires de recherche.

KEYWORDS:

• Partnership
• interdisciplinary research
• Canada
• translational research
• work-family balance

MOTS-CLÉS:

• Recherche translationnelle
• équilibre travail-famille
• partenariat
• recherche interdisciplinaire
• Canada

Acknowledgments

This research was made possible by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SHRCC) to Nathalie Houlfort. The authors would like to thank the research assistants, Sarah Bourdeau, Mathilde Valentini-Grégoire, Flavie Dion-Cliche, Gabriel Lemay-Lapointe and Charles-Étienne Lavoie, for their implication and contribution in this project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Complete methodology and results are presented in Houlfort et al. (in preparation). Atypical Schedules and Work-Family Balance in the Transportation Industry: An Interdisciplinary Analysis of Individual and Collective Strategies.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Notes on contributors

Nathalie Houlfort

Nathalie Houlfort, Ph. D., is a psychology professor and Director of the Laboratoire de recherche sur le Comportement Organisationnel at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM). Prof. Houlfort has a Ph.D. in social psychology from McGill University and has developed an expertise in workers’ motivational processes. Her current research focuses on passion for work and work-life balance. She is committed to the study of work-life balance issues from an interdisciplinary perspective.

Mélanie Lefrançois

Mélanie Lefrançois, Ph.D., specializes in organizational communication and work analysis (French-tradition ergonomics). She is a professor of occupational health and safety at the Business School of University of Quebec at Montreal (ESG UQAM). Her recent work has focused on relational dynamics, work organization and operational leeway related to the experience of work/family in low-wage, low-prestige and low-schedule control occupations.

Stéphanie Bernstein

Stéphanie Bernstein is a professor of labour and employment law at the Law Department of the Université du Québec à Montréal, and a member of CINBIOSE (www.cinbiose.uqam.ca) and the Interuniversity Research Centre on Work and Globalization (CRIMT) (www.crimt.org). Her research concerns national, international and comparative labour and employment law, and the regulation of precarious work, work-family balance, and care work. Much of her research involves community organizations and unions.

Karen Messing

Karen Messing, Ph.D., is professor emerita of ergonomics (work analysis) at the CINBIOSE research centre, UQAM. Her work focuses on women’s occupational health, including work/family issues, especially in the low wage service sector. She wrote One-eyed Science: Occupational Health and Working Women (Temple, Philadelphia, 1998) and Pain and Prejudice: What Science Can Learn about Work from the People Who Do It (BTL, Toronto, 2014). She received the 2014 Yant Award from the American Industrial Hygiene Association for her contribution to industrial hygiene.

Anne-Renée Gravel

Anne Renée Gravel, Ph.D., is a professor of occupational health and safety at Téluq (Distance Education University of Québec). She adopts a feminist analytical perspective in her research and is particularly interested work and family conflict, collective work dynamics and any organizational factors that affect occupational health. She is a member of the research team ‘Gender equity in occupational health’ supported by the Fond de recherche du Québec – Société et Culture.

Vanessa Blanchette-Luong

Vanessa Blanchette-Luong is a graduate student in psychology at Université du québec à Montréal (UQAM). Her current research interests are work-family balance issues and how managers can facilitate work-family strategies.