If you are like me and find yourself drawn to applied research or field-based inquiry, your scholarship may focus on or at least depend upon the way practitioners (like parents, teachers, social workers, health care professionals, school leaders, etc.) implement programming. In my quest to understand implementation and the barriers to effective implementation, I’ve found myself exploring outside the boundaries of my “field” which, if pushed, I would identify as early childhood development and education. Recently, I read an article by Versey (2015) that discussed strategies that adults use to manage the sometimes conflicting demands that employed adults may face in balancing work and family obligations. Versey introduces work-life balance as a developmental process that unfolds over the life course. It seems like such an obvious way to think about balancing work and family–an incremental and recursive process of discovering our own limits and strengths in the shifting landscape of our obligations and aspirations. Yet, many of us fail to consider the way our adult participants are continuing to learn and develop through the life course. As a potential result, we understand so little about the strategies that adults use and whether or not there are explicit supports that we should be providing in training sessions that are meant to change their professional practice but might, as an unintended effect, also put pressure on how they were balancing work and life obligations prior to the intervention.
Versey (2015) focuses on the role of perceived control, what others might call agency, as an important coping mechanism. Lazarus (2006; as well as Lazarus & Folkman, 1984) spent much of his career examining the role that stress plays in a person’s appraisal of situations and the subsequent coping mechanisms an individual employs. In fact, Versey found that participants who were able to appraise positively instances of conflict between home and family roles experienced better psychological health and reported less transfer of negativity (i.e., anger, frustration) from work to family settings and vice versa. Interestingly, Versey found that this relationship was larger for women than for men. This study is definitely worth a read for prevention scientists or applied researchers whose work is based in schools where the majority of teachers and school leaders are often women. Moving forward, it would also be worthwhile to conduct of review of whether interventions specifically target these capacities and, if so, how.
