The Workplace Practices and Daily Family Well-Being Project

Penn State is part of the Work, Family Health Network (WFHN), which is comprised of eight coordinating organizations conducting research on how best to improve the health of workers and their families and reduce work-family conflict, while also benefiting the organizations. The Workplace Practices and Daily Family Well-Being Project (PI: David Almeida) involves daily diary interviews for eight consecutive days with employees and one of their children aged 9 through 17 before and twelve months after an employer-initiated workplace program designed to increase employee flexibility and control over how and when their work is done and to increase the support of supervisors for employees’ work-family issues. On four of the eight diary days, employee parents and children also collected their saliva throughout the day. The purpose of Penn State’s diary component of the Work, Family, Health Study is to study a subsample of employees and their children in more depth to assess whether the outcomes of the employer-initiated workplace program spill over to improve employees’ daily family processes and health and cross over to daily family processes and health in children.

The WFHN is funded by a cooperative agreement from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human, the National Institute on Aging, and the Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research of the National Institutes of Health and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The network received additional funding from the Administration for Children and Families. Penn State (PI: Susan McHale) received additional funding from the W. T. Grant Foundation to further investigate the connection between parents’ experiences in the workplace setting and children’s experiences in the family setting.