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Despite the proliferation of work–family research, a thorough understanding of family role status changes (e.g. the gaining of elder or child caregiving responsibilities) remain under-theorized and under-examined. The purpose of this paper is to conceptualize various forms of family role status changes and examine the ways in which these changes influence various employee outcomes.

Data were collected as part of the work–family health study. Using a longitudinal, three-wave study with two-time lags of 6 months (n = 151 family role status changes; n = 392 individuals with family role stability), this study uses one-way analysis of variance to compare mean differences across groups and multilevel modeling to examine the predictive effects of family role status changes.

Overall, experiences of employees undergoing a family role status change did not differ significantly from employees whose family role status remained stable over the same 12-month period. Separation/divorce predicted higher levels of family-to-work conflict.

The work raises important considerations for organizational science and human resource policy research to better understand the substantive effects of family role status changes on employee well-being.

This paper aims to investigate the extent to which family roles and settings can mediate the impact of unemployment on psychological well-being among Italian households.

Using the European Health Interview Survey data for 2015, the authors adopt linear regression models to evaluate the effect of family settings on the mental health outcomes of unemployment, in particular on the likelihood of developing depression. The latter is measured using the internationally validated Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-8). Since the gender gap in occupation has not ceased to exist in Italy, special attention is paid to the differences between males and females in the workforce.

The results suggest that involvement in parental roles has a moderating influence on unemployment mental health outcomes among both men and women, although it has a higher effect on the female workforce. Moreover, the study shows that “not living far from the family of origin” could be considered a crucial moderating factor for both gender categories.

The novelty of this paper lies in its consideration of the implications the social definition of gender roles may have on gender-related expectancies and attributions in life domains, such as work and family.

Despite widespread agreement that work and family roles are interdependent, there is little consensus as to how work affects family functioning. Presents a framework to account for this. First, articulates two hypotheses critical to this framework. It is the quality of the employment experience, and not employment status nor the quantity of employment, that is critical to understanding the effects of work on the family. Thus, the traditional assumption that employment is uniformly beneficial for men and detrimental for women is of little explanatory value. Work exerts an indirect effect on family functioning, and the variables that link work and family are pivotal in understanding the inter‐dependence of work and family. Presents research conducted explicitly to test this framework. Identifies conceptual ramifications and implications for organizational interventions and personal counselling.

Purposes – The overall aim of the chapter is to explore children's acting and disputing within a family role-play and highlight how different roles are argued upon and negotiated by the participants, both verbally and nonverbally.

Methodology – The chapter is drawn from a single play episode between five 6-year-old girls at a Swedish preschool. The analytical framework of the study is influenced by ethnomethodological work on social action focusing in particular on participants’ methodical ways of accomplishing and making sense of social activities.

Findings – The analyses show that the girls use a range of verbal and nonverbal resources to argue and accomplish the social order of the play (i) using past tense to display the factual past event status, and present tense to bid for upcoming events, (ii) building a mutual pretend understanding of places and objects that were used to configure nearness as well as distance in the girls’ interaction and relationship. Finally, the analyses clearly show that the significance of a pretend role is situated and depends on the social context in which it is negotiated.

Practical implications – To get acquainted with detailed analyses of children's pretend play can be useful for preschool teachers’ understanding of how children build relationships within the play, and hopefully awaken their interest to study children's play in depth in everyday practice.

Value of chapter – The present chapter contributes to a wider understanding of how social relationships are argued and negotiated by preschool girls within pretend family role-play.

The current study seeks to argue that the constructs of work demand and family demand have been neglected in the work‐family conflict (WFC) literature. The authors aim to help clarify the definition and utilize direct measures of perceived work and family demand to test main effect, mediated, and interactive hypotheses.

A sample of 698 university employees participated in a comprehensive computer survey that considered various manifest indicators and multiple scales across work and family domains. Moderator hierarchical regression and LISREL 8.0 were used in analyzing the data.

The results indicate that both forms of demand have significant direct effects on work interfering with family (WIF) and family interfering with work (FIW). Both demand constructs partially mediate the effects of three categories of domain variables on the two forms of conflict. Finally, the work demand‐WIF relationship is found to be stronger for those with relatively high family centrality.

A cross‐sectional design was used and may be problematic when examining relationships that occur over time. Further, capturing all scales with a single survey could result in common method bias, which may have inflated the predictive relationships.

Organizations can work to reduce WFC by adopting family‐friendly programs that help employees balance work and family demands. Specifically, this study implies that organizations should find ways to hold constant or reduce perceptions of work and family demand, along with other direct antecedents of WIF and FIW.

This study provides a relatively comprehensive model of antecedents that can be useful in future research. The authors also examine interactive effects of demand and work‐family centrality on conflict using direct measures of perceived demand. Methodologically, the research improves on some past studies by measuring perceived demand directly and by not narrowing our sample to employees who are married or those with children. Hopefully, these contributions will help stimulate continued growth in the work‐family literature.

Family socio-cultural values and its practices have pervasive effects on early age at first marriage in every society. The purpose of this paper is to examine and compare how family socio-cultural values and its practices exert effect on early age at first marriage between Muslim and Santal couples in rural Bangladesh.

First of all through snow-ball process and checking of marriage documents the author carefully identified 598 couples from Muslim and 560 from Santal who were married the first time between 1995 and 2005 years and whose age range was 12-48 years for husbands and 10-45 years for wives. Then, 585 pairs of couples (295 for Muslim and 290 for Santal) were randomly selected from the Talonda of Rajshahi district, Bangladesh. Data were collected, applying interview method with semi-structural questionnaire in family setting. Then the collected data were analyzed, using χ2 test and binary logistic regression (BLR) technique.

The frequency distribution showed that most of the Santal couples compared to the Muslim ones were married before the minimum legal age in Bangladesh. The results of χ2 test of the frequency distribution were significant at p<0.01 and p<0.05 level. In addition, results of BLR analysis suggested that early age at first marriage was significantly (p<0.01 and p<0.05) associated with family socio-cultural values studied. It is argued that ethnicity, family pattern, residence pattern, illiteracy and ascriptive occupational status were the risk factors to persist early marriage among the Santal couples than the Muslim ones in rural Bangladesh.

Although the findings are suggestive to understand differences in early marriage associated with family socio-cultural values between the ethnic couples, further cross-cultural study should be conducted on how socio-psychological factors affect early marriage between the ethnic groups. In spite of the limitations these findings may have implications in comparative social policy practice to prevent early marriage associated with changes in family socio-cultural values between the ethnic groups in Bangladesh.

The findings in the paper are original in linking between family socio-cultural theory, its related policy and practice to prevent early marriage between the ethnic couples in Bangladesh.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how work and family aspirations relate to occupational achievements and gender differences herein.

Using data from 2009 the authors examined the relationship between career and childrearing aspirations and occupational achievements of Dutch parents. Using path modeling in Mplus, the authors investigated both direct and indirect pathways where aspirations were related to occupational achievements via time allocations.

The authors found that ranking being promoted instead of a non-career aspiration as the most important job aspiration was positively related to occupational achievements. Surprisingly, the authors also found that ranking childrearing as the most important life role aspiration was positively related to earnings among fathers.

Investigating aspirations in multiple domains simultaneously can provide new information on working parents’ occupational achievements.

The results imply that parents who want to achieve an authority position or high earnings may need to prioritize their promotion aspiration among their job aspirations in order to increase the likelihood of achieving such a position. Moreover, this is likely to require sacrifices outside the work domain, since spending more time on paid work is an important way to achieve this aspiration.

This paper adds to previous research by explicitly taking life role aspirations into account instead of focussing solely on job aspirations. Moreover, this study extends previous research by investigating indirect pathways from aspirations to occupational achievements via family work in addition to the previously found pathway via paid work.

This study seeks to develop a clearer understanding of the motivational factors affecting Saudi female business undergraduates' choice of pursuing entrepreneurship.

The research adopts a quantitative approach to gain general understanding of the students' perceptions with regard to their motivations to pursue entrepreneurship. Data were collected through a structured questionnaire survey administered to 214 female business undergraduates at Prince Mohammad Bin Fahd University (PMU) in Al-Khobar, to investigate their perceptions of entrepreneurial motivations. Descriptive statistics and factor analysis were used to identify the motivational factors. Multiple regression analysis was used to reveal relationships between the motivation factors and entrepreneurial motivation of female business undergraduates.

The study revealed four generalised entrepreneurial motivations among Saudi female business undergraduates: personal motivational factors with an emphasis on freedom and social status; business motivational factors such as financial rewards and security; social motivational factors manifested in the influence of the community, roles and family; and environmental motivations which were mainly associated to education, the market knowledge and ability to access finance.

The study was restricted to female students at PMU University. Thus, generalisation of the results could be limited. The findings of the study could be useful to relevant authorities to enhance and boost entrepreneurship for female students and hence to contribute to the national Vision 2030.

This study is among those few studies located in the MENA region that explore Saudi female university students' attitude towards entrepreneurship. It adds to the authors' understanding on the four generalised factors by highlighting the importance of the family's role and entrepreneurship education in motivating Saudi female students towards entrepreneurship engagement. It also contributes to the understanding of these motivations that could be applied in other similar contexts.

…the astonishing struggle that lasts forever Francine Du Plessix Gray (2000). …the simultaneous sound of…both harmonies and dissonances Kurt Lüscher (2000). I wanted to watch my father die because I hated him. Oh, I loved him… Sharon Olds (1992).The concept of absolute absence or presence is not meaningful for adult children when an elderly parent’s mind is slipping away. This is a time of increased ambiguity in the family boundary, in which the status and roles of the demented elder are no longer clear, and often not agreed upon. Not knowing if a parent is absent or present, the potential for ambivalence in the adult children is high. Within this intergenerational context, the main thesis of this paper is that the ambiguous loss of a parent with dementia provides fertile ground for increased ambivalence in intergenerational relations (Boss, 1999, 2002). The heightened ambiguity and resulting ambivalence may or may not be problematic, depending on cognitive awareness and family processes.