Spillover of domains: testing the influence of work-family conflict on staff at a Southern U.S. prison

ABSTRACT

Correctional staff are a valuable resource for prisons. Nevertheless, they work in a unique environment characterized by numerous stressors that may affect them at work and at home. The literature on predictors of job stress (both in corrections and in other work environments) is extensive, but few studies have examined the role of work-family conflict. The current study examined how the four types of work-family conflict (i.e., time-, strain-, behavior-, and family-based) affect job stress among staff at a large, state-operated correctional facility in the Southern U.S. While time-, strain-, and behavior-based conflict were positively correlated with job stress at the bivariate level, the influence of time-based conflict on job stress became non-significant after controlling for other demographic and contextual variables. Only strain- and behavior-based conflict remained significant predictors of job stress in the multivariate regression analyses. These findings highlight the importance of differentiating between the various dimensions of work-family conflict. Furthermore, all correctional staff need to be aware of the signs and symptoms of work-family conflict and should be trained in the proper responses and places to refer colleagues when necessary.

KEYWORDS:

• prison staff
• work-family conflict
• job stress
• correctional staff

Data availability statement

Due to the nature of this research, participants of this study did not agree for their data to be shared publicly, so supporting data is not available. Results are available upon request from the first author.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Only 4% of U.S. prisons house 2,500 or more persons and 69% of U.S. correctional facilities house 1,000 or less individuals (Stephan, 2008). The prison in the current study housed more than 4,000 persons, making it a very large for a U.S. prison. Additionally, most U.S correctional staff, including correctional officers, are male. Specifically, about 68% of correctional staff are men and 32% are women (Zippia, 2023). Furthermore, the majority of staff housing male offenders in the U.S. are men (Chandler, 2018). In the study prison, more than 70% of the staff, including 74% of the correctional officers, were women, a finding not typical of most U.S. prisons holding male offenders. The prison in the current study is unusual because of its size and the gender of the majority of its staff.

2 The reason for running three models was to determine the association of job stress with the personal characteristics as a block and with the work-family conflict measures as a block. The full model was run to determine how the entire group of independent variables related to job stress. Model 1 (only personal characteristics) was not significant. As shown in Model 2 (only work-family conflict measures), the inclusion of the personal characteristics (control variables) did not alter the results found in Model 3 (full model with all independent variables). As such, only Model 3 is discussed in the Results. The regression equation for Model 1 was not significant based on the F test. A model without controls (i.e., Model 2) returned very similar estimates. For Model 2, the R-squared was .28, indicating that the four work-family conflict variables as a block explained about 28% of the observed variance in the job stress measure. Time- and family-based conflict did not have significant associations. Strain- and behavior-based conflict had significant positive relationships with job stress.