Social Science Grant Examines Work-Life Balance in Faculty
PI: Dana Lee Baker and Carolyn Long, Associate Professors of Political Science, WSU Vancouver
Funded: 2011
Project Overview and Link to ADVANCE Initiatives
There is little doubt that achieving and maintaining work-life balance involves substantial challenges. Arguably, significant barriers exist for women pursuing careers in traditionally male dominated fields such as the academy in general and STEM disciplines in particular. Continued work directed at articulating, specifying and understanding these challenges is of vital importance. A better understanding of barriers to full participation in meaningful careers is fundamental to improving policies and practices designed to nurture inclusive workplaces.
On the other hand, every day people experience success in achieving a work-life balance. Furthermore, work in a variety of social sciences ranging from anthropology to sociology demonstrates that individuals with complex lives, including engagement with meaningful work, involvement with family and friends, participation in the community, and recreational activities tend to enjoy greater success and satisfaction. Creating a better understanding of factors underlying success in work-life balance is at least as important as understanding barriers.
This project assumes that as with most social and political phenomena, when examining work-life balance, positive experiences are not the opposite of negative ones. Instead, they are fundamentally different. The goal of this project is to explore the experiences, attitudes, and environmental characteristics of success in work-life balance. The project is rooted in the academic discipline of public administration, which is concerned at its core with the cooperative effort of complex human beings dedicated to public service and to missions directed at improving management of public programs. Higher education constitutes a quintessentially public mission, especially at public universities. The results of this study are expected to contribute to public administration literature focusing on employee success in the context of public personnel administration and public service culture.
Literature Review
This project is informed by three primary streams of research found in both public administration and related social science disciplines: positive psychology, strengths based management and public administration ecology. Each of these research areas includes a focus on humans at work. The first stream, positive psychology, employs the individual as the unit of analysis. The second, strengths-based management, revolves around the department or organization. The third, public administration ecology, focuses on the context in which public work is embedded, sometimes as bounded by a particular community or area of public policy. The combination of these areas of research provides the necessarily hierarchical framework buttressing the current project (and most work in public administration).
Data & Methods
Data for this project will be collected using semi-structured interviews. Interviewees will include faculty from both STEM and non-STEM disciplines employed at Washington State University. The goal of the project is to conduct between 30 and 40 interviews, each of which will be approximately 45 minutes in length. Participants will be selected using a purposive sampling strategy including elements of snowball sampling. The primary investigators will start by brainstorming a list of target participants on the WSU campuses. Each participant will also be asked to recommend at least one colleague to participate in the project.
Expected Findings
We anticipate that the project will uncover explanations of success in work-life balance rooted in both individual and workgroup characteristics. Furthermore, we anticipate that individuals experiencing success in the workplace will have a generally positive outlook on other life domains regardless of specific individual circumstances. We also expect that some of the cornerstones of success described will be especially unique to academia, most likely related to the flexibility and discretion involved in working in academia. Finally, it is likely that the explanations for success will be differently articulated in STEM and non-STEM disciplines. At this point at time we are unsure whether or not such differences will be inherently different or simply differently expressed.
Dr. Dana L. Baker, PI
VMMC 202N
Dr. Carolyn Long, PI
VDEN 208
