Search results

The objective of this study was to determine whether an association between coparenting trajectories and parental commitment exists five years after the birth of focal children. Situated in commitment theory, the study used data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study to estimate latent growth curve models to test the relationship between coparenting trajectories and commitment theory. Results show that the coparenting trajectory decreased over the four-year period, but reports remained high. Mothers who report high levels of coparenting also report being committed to the biological father, albeit commitment is low. This finding shows that parents may be dedicated to their children and constrained by the parental dyad. These findings support the hypothesis that children are constraining the parental dyad. Further, coparenting among unmarried, cohabiting parents influence parental relationships over time–substantiating the argument that a “new package deal” exists.

Social implications – If parents feel constrained to each other due to shared children, policies directed at coparenting, rather than marriage incentives and promotion, could help parents learn to negotiate their parental duties with each other to ensure that both parents are vested in their children’s lives.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between country of birth or ethnicity (cultural proxies) and career and parental role commitment, and whether or not that relationship is mediated by two psychological dimensions known to differ across Mexican and USA cultures. These mediators are family achievement orientation and gender role orientation.

Data were collected from 372 working female students at community colleges in the USA and Mexico. The survey focussed on career and parental role commitment, family achievement orientation, and gender role attitudes.

Both country of birth and ethnicity predict career and parental role commitment. Females born in Mexico and Hispanics have higher career role commitment and lower parental role commitment than females born in the USA and non-Hispanic whites. Family achievement orientation and gender role attitudes partially mediate these relationships.

Cross-cultural research of work and family issues needs to incorporate psychological dimensions in accounting for country/ethnic differences.

Employees’ cultural backgrounds should be considered in designing programs to support family and work balance.

Assistance programs designed to enable Hispanics to work will be valued and fit with the Hispanic cultural focus on working as a means to care for family.

This study addresses a stated need in the work/life literature for research that addresses cross-cultural differences, and research in the cross-cultural research that calls for the inclusion of psychological dimension mediators between culture and the variables of interest.

Proactive career behavior (PCB) is an effective form of career self-management that has positive impacts on individual career development and career success, and therefore, the purpose of this paper is to explore the driving factors of PCB.

Drawing on the interactionist perspective and situational strength theory, this study examined the independent and joint effects of role commitment and pay-for-performance (PFP) on employees' PCB based on data collected from 298 Chinese private enterprise employees at two time points.

The authors found that occupational role commitment (ORC), parental role commitment (PRC) and PFP were positively related to PCB. Furthermore, PFP moderated the relationship between ORC/PRC and PCB, such that the two relationships were stronger when PFP was low.

Drawing on the interactionist perspective, the authors contribute to the literature on PCB by revealing novel antecedents of PCB: ORC, PRC and PFP. The authors also contribute to the situational strength theory by examining how role commitment and PFP may interact to impact employees' PCB. Finally, the authors are among the first to consider the effects of role commitment on individual career behaviors, thus extending the nomological network of role commitment.

Despite the over-representation of stepfamilies in the clientele receiving protective services, there is still very little information about the different forms of the parental commitment of stepfathers in those families. However, the characteristics of families receiving child protective services (CPS) are likely to influence the way that the stepfathers’ commitment is expressed.

Taking into account the viewpoint of mothers (n = 10), stepfathers (n = 10), and adolescents (n = 10), this study attempted to document, using the free association method and semistructured interviews, the following: (1) the representations that the members of these stepfamilies had of the stepfathers’ parental commitment; and (2) the way in which engagement was expressed in daily life.

While the participants agreed that the stepfather had a parental role to play, that is to take care of the children, they did not necessarily agree about which dimensions were the most important. Whereas the adults emphasized the child-rearing dimension of this role and the necessary cooperation with the biological parents, the adolescents insisted on the relational aspect. The results likewise indicated that these men were very committed to their partners’ adolescents and showed that even in families challenged by problems that lead to involvement with CPS, stepfathers can play a positive, supportive role.

This study represents an important addition to the existing literature on the role of stepfathers in that it uses multiple measures and direct reports from father figures allowing us to explore the main dimensions of stepfather commitment.

It is very important for health institutions to develop the occupational commitment of their nurses. While the occupational commitments of the nurses develop during their education, they also change according to certain variables during their work life. In order to employ nurses who are more committed to their occupation, it is essential to know the effects of these variables on occupational commitment. The purpose of this paper is to exhibit and test a model that will display the correlation between demographic, work life and family life variables and occupational commitment.

The research was conducted with the participation of 355 nurses employed in seven state hospitals with 500 or more bed capacity and three medical faculties under the administration of Ankara Ministry of Health, using the proportional distribution method in stratified sampling. Structural equation modeling was used for analysis.

The results of the analysis suggest that there is a relationship between the nurses’ professional commitment and age, education, parental status, tenure and working hours scheme. Although the previous studies generally revealed a positive relationship between professional commitment and age and tenure, the relationship found out in this study is a negative one. Similarly, although a negative relationship was presented between professional commitment and parental status and working hours scheme, the relationship revealed in this study is a positive one. Further, unlike the previous studies, this study found out no relationship between the nurses’ professional commitment and weekly working time.

This study is an original study, having been applied to a different sample in a different cultural environment. The authors sincerely believe that the results of the study will be beneficial to the scientific world.

In the last twenty years, the women’s movement has resulted in a greater representation of women in once male-dominated venues, such as the job force and higher education. Women currently represent nearly 43% of those in the United States labor market, and it is expected that four in every five women ages 25–54 will be employed by the year 2000 (Hoyt, 1988; U.S. Department of Labor, 1995). Despite women’s increasing participation in the world of work, they continue to choose occupations that represent the stereotypically feminine range of occupations, meaning less pay and less status (Betz & Fitzgerald, 1987). For example, women are still underrepresented in engineering, architecture, and the physical sciences (Eccles, 1994; U.S. Department of Labor Women’s Bureau, 1995). These gender-based occupational patterns are also evidenced in college enrollment; women continue to comprise the majority in academic majors that are considered traditionally feminine, such as early childhood, elementary, and secondary education, library science, nursing, and home economics, whereas men are the predominant majors in physics, chemistry, architecture, and engineering (Bartholomew & Schnorr, 1994; National Science Foundation, 1990).

The purpose of this study was to determine whether core constructs from the control (impulsivity resulting from poor parental discipline leads to crime) and moral (weak moral values lead to crime) models of criminal lifestyle development were capable of predicting crime continuance in early-to-mid adolescent youth.

Weak parental supervision and lack of remorse for antisocial conduct on the part of the child were correlated with subsequent delinquency in 1,850 (1,685 males, 165 females) early-to-mid adolescent delinquents. Analyses were based exclusively on data extracted from New York City probation, family court and police files.

Results from a negative binomial regression analysis revealed that both weak parental supervision and lack of remorse for antisocial conduct predicted subsequent delinquency over a period of six months, net the effects of age, sex, ethnicity, prior delinquency, sibling delinquency, negative peer associations, substance use and a felony charge.

These findings provide preliminary support for the control (low parental supervision) and moral (lack of remorse) models of criminal lifestyle development.

Weak parental supervision and failure to express remorse for antisocial actions increased risk of future delinquency by 19% and 29%, respectively. Teaching parents to be more effective disciplinarians and encouraging the development of moral values in youthful offenders may be of value in promoting desistance to crime in early juvenile offenders.

The importance of these results is that they reinforce prior findings obtained using self-report measures with data collected from official records.

This study aims to offer understanding of the parent – child relationship by examining, through a socio-material lens, how one aspect of the new child surveillance technology market, child GPS trackers (CGT), are rejected or adopted by families, highlighting implications for child welfare, privacy and children’s rights policy.

The authors gathered netnographic data from a range of online sources (parenting forums, online product reviews, discussion boards) that captured parental views towards the use of CGT and stories of the technology in use and theorize the data through application of a novel combination of neutralisation and affordance theory.

The research reveals how critics of CGT highlight the negative affordances of such product use (highlighting the negative agency of the technology). Parental adopters of CGT, in turn, attempt to rationalize their use of the technology as a mediator in the parent – child relation through utilisation of a range of neutralisation mechanisms which re-afford positive product agency. Implications for child welfare and policy are discussed in the light of those findings.

The paper presents an empirical, qualitative understanding of parents negotiating the emergence of a controversial new child-related technology – CGT – and its impact upon debates in the field of parenting and childhood; develops the theory of parental style towards parental affordances, using a socio-material theoretical lens to augment existing sociological approaches; and contributes to the debates surrounding child welfare, ethics, privacy and human rights in the context of child surveillance GPS technologies.

The purpose of this article is to report an exploratory study which was designed to illuminate how school cultures and teachers' value orientations are affected by the educational change of parental involvement.

The qualitative research that informs this paper is conceptualized within the interpretive paradigm. Two schools were selected purposefully for the study. In‐depth interviews with 12 teachers and their principal were conducted in each school where observation took place for half a year. Eventually themes and dimensions of teachers' value demarcations emerged in times of change.

The study demonstrates that three balkanized factions of teachers were wrestling at school. The first balkanized teacher group welcomed the innovation of parental involvement. The second faction of teachers who disbelieved such innovation was found diffident and conservative, and demonstrated resistance to change. The third type of teachers was of a majority who might or might not take part in implementing change. However, once incentives were imposed from the management, they would probably be assimilated.

The study aims at illuminating teachers' responses to change. It does not attempt to make generalization.

The study reveals that managing teacher balkanization in times of change, school leaders' personal beliefs and their early intervention, are of paramount importance.

Previous theories discuss how corporate managers can stir anti-discrimination laws away from their initial social goal by managerializing the law. Yet, other actors – notably insider activists – can contribute to move corporate regulations beyond merely symbolic compliance. I demonstrate this influence of activists with three cases studies: (1) LGBT activists for same-sex parental leave; (2) disability rights activists for implementing a quota; and (3) Muslim activists to secure accommodations in French workplaces. Through these cases, I show how activists can move corporate laws beyond compliance, pressure firms to go from merely symbolic to substantive compliance, and analyze mechanisms that explain their unequal success. Bringing together insights from the legal endogeneity theory and social movements theory, I analyze these activist legal intermediaries as actors faced with unequal structure of opportunities, and examine what factors hinder or favor an activist-driven legal endogeneity. I demonstrate the impact of more prescriptive regulations, the institutional power of union representatives (and their alignment with activists’ claims), reputational stakes for companies, and the resources of activists themselves (legal expertise, ability to reframe laws, and informal power within their organizations). Last, I show how activists leverage organizational and legal tools (collective agreement, diversity policies) to induce recoupling between formal commitments and informal practices.