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by Charity Shumway

Self-Employment and Work-Family Balance

Is being your own boss the ticket to eliminating work-family conflict? Or is working for an organization with family-friendly policies the secret to balance? Adelphi Associate Professor David Prottas, Ph.D., studies exactly these issues.

Working with a large data set collected by the Family and Work Institute, Dr. Prottas has looked extensively at self-employment and family-related workplace benefits.

鈥淲e have this idea that self-employment is the avenue to wonderful work-family balance,鈥� he says. 鈥淎nd the data…suggest that it works. Self-employed people in general have less work-to-family conflict than people who work for organizations.鈥�

But he鈥檚 quick to add that it鈥檚 not as simple as that. 鈥淲hat seems to make a difference is not some magical quality to self-employment. It鈥檚 the job autonomy. If you compare organizational versus self-employed people, similar levels of autonomy equal similar levels of conflict.鈥�

In fact, Dr. Prottas points out, self-employed people are, on average, happier and earn more money than the organizationally employed, but the self-employed also tend to be older, more highly educated and, more often, men, all characteristics that correspond with higher job satisfaction and earnings. 鈥淭he data suggest that the self-employed earn more on average, but the particular type of workers likely to choose self-employment would actually earn more had they remained employees,鈥� says Dr. Prottas. 鈥淵ou can think of it as the tax on not having a boss.鈥�

If self-employment in and of itself isn’t the magic bullet, perhaps a family-friendly workplace is. Dr. Prottas says that, once again, the answer is yes and no. 鈥淭he data show that family-friendly programs in the workplace make a bit of a difference, but what really seems to count in an institutional setting are the intangibles,鈥� he says. 鈥淔ormal programs don鈥檛 do that much, but the supportiveness of your colleagues and your boss does.鈥�

Maybe in the end, that tax on not having a boss is a small price to pay for having an employer鈥攜ourself鈥� whom you can count on to support your family- related choices.

Substance Abuse, Internet Abuse and Family Intervention

Errol Rodriguez, Ph.D., assistant dean and director of the master鈥檚 program in general psychology and mental health counseling, has spent much of the last decade studying families who have been affected by addiction. 鈥淪omewhere between four and five significant others are affected by one person鈥檚 addiction,鈥� explains Dr. Rodriguez. 鈥淲e know that somewhere around 23 million people are substance abusers annually, so that鈥檚 about one-third of the country each year that鈥檚 affected.鈥�

One way Dr. Rodriguez hopes to reach more of the people affected by substance abuse is through Community Reinforcement and Family Training (CRAFT) interventions. Rather than the traditional model of intervention, which involves a surprise confrontation with the addict, the CRAFT model is a strategically planned intervention where family members first discuss their role in enabling abuse and then determine what they can do so the using person begins to feel the consequences of his or her substance abuse.

鈥淚t鈥檚 a powerful behavioral therapy approach,鈥� Dr. Rodriguez says. 鈥淲ith over 80 percent of the people who begin the CRAFT model, their significant other enters treatment.鈥�

鈥淭hat doesn鈥檛 mean they stop using,鈥� Dr. Rodriguez clarifies, 鈥渂ut family members often feel a great sense of relief knowing that their loved one has started to get help.鈥�

Dr. Rodriguez鈥檚 most recent research focuses on a new type of abuse: Internet addiction, particularly among adolescents.

鈥淪ome young adults are really glued to their phones, to the Internet, in a way that becomes problematic for their lives and their families,鈥� Dr. Rodriguez says. 鈥淚t鈥檚 different from other teenagers who enjoy their phones but don鈥檛 seem obsessed with them.鈥�

Dr. Rodriguez is examining vulnerabilities to this type of compulsivity. 鈥淚s it similar to other addictions, like alcohol or marijuana?鈥� Dr. Rodriguez wonders. 鈥淎re some of the same markers that put teens at risk for other behaviors, things like low self-esteem and eagerness to fit in, involved in compulsive Internet use?鈥� In the coming year, he鈥檒l begin to find out.

Aging Family Members and Hidden Mental Health Issues

Associate Professor of Richard Francoeur first became interested in hidden mental health issues early in his career, as a medical social worker at a Veteran鈥檚 Administration hospital in Pennsylvania. He went on to compare the financial strain-related coping processes of patients over 65 who were undergoing outpatient palliative radiation for cancer with those of younger patients undergoing similar treatment.

Dr. Francoeur鈥檚 study revealed that older patients were more concerned about not having enough resources for the future, while younger patients were more concerned with difficulty meeting their current obligations. 鈥淢ost screening for financial vulnerability and stress focus on present issues [like] paying bills,鈥� says Dr. Francoeur, 鈥渟o clinicians can miss older patients who are struggling, but who frame the issue differently.鈥�

Similarly, in research with epidemiological data from an inner-city outpatient population receiving palliative care, Dr. Francoeur has found that screens for depression often miss older minority men. 鈥淥lder adults are less likely to say that they feel sad, and yet they very much may be depressed even though they don鈥檛 use those kinds of terms,鈥� Dr. Francoeur explains.

As an outgrowth of his work on hidden mental health issues, Dr. Francoeur鈥檚 research has more recently turned to symptom clusters. In his latest study, the experience of pain predicts depressive affect more strongly when pain occurred with fatigue and weakness or with sleeping difficulties, but only in patients reporting fever. When pain and either of these symptoms manifest together, interventions to relieve fever could reduce pain sensitivity and sickness malaise, which are concerns to multidisciplinary healthcare teams and smoking cessation programs.

Dr. Francoeur鈥檚 recent work has also focused on methodological advancement, in particular statistical innovations in moderated regression that make detecting and analyzing symptom clusters easier. Using his new methods, he plans next to look at symptom clusters in nonmalignant conditions that are related to the abuse of prescription drugs.

Intimacy and Power in Relationships

For many years, Professor Janice Steil鈥檚 research focused on power in close relationships, particularly marriage. 鈥淗istorically, marriage is associated with more benefits for men than for women, and unhappy marriages are associated with more costs for women than they are for men,鈥� she explains. 鈥淚 wanted to know under what conditions relationships are mutually beneficial.鈥�

Her research showed that women who have more equal voices, who feel that housework and childcare are fairly shared, and whose husbands are supportive of their paid work are less depressed and benefit more from their relationships, says Dr. Steil.

Several years ago, however, at the urging of one of her graduate students, Dr. Steil鈥檚 interests began to shift from power to intimacy. Her first research in the area, a collaborative study with Derner alumna (then Ph.D. candidate) Susan Rosenbluth, M.A. 鈥�89, Ph.D. 鈥�92, looked at influence strategies in relationships and perceptions of intimacy. 鈥淲e found that the more reciprocal the relationships, the more intimate the relationships, the better the well-being for both partners,鈥� Dr. Steil says.

In a more recent study, Dr. Steil looked at expectation of intimacy and attachment styles in engaged couples and followed up with the same couples five years later to determine how their intimacy expectations and attachment styles had played out in their marital satisfaction and psychological well-being after marriage. She found that greater intimacy was associated with lower depression rates, both for the engaged and the married.

鈥淧eople think that women are more relationship oriented and men less,鈥� Dr. Steil says. 鈥淏ut, actually, men are clearly equally dependent upon intimate relationships. The benefits of intimacy were the same for both women and for men in this study.鈥�

Dr. Steil鈥檚 most recent research focuses on cross-cultural conceptions of intimacy. 鈥淲hat鈥檚 different in today鈥檚 relationships from past relationships is that they鈥檙e more individualistically oriented,鈥� Dr. Steil explains. 鈥淲e put a huge burden on our partners to fulfill our intimacy needs. In a non-Western, more collectivist culture, you might have a much broader range of people who are fulfilling these intimacy needs.鈥� To test her ideas, Dr. Steil, in collaboration with Derner alumna Beth Turetsky, M.A. 鈥�84, Ph.D. 鈥�90, is comparing intimacy expectations among students from China who are studying English at the Adelphi-based ELS program with intimacy expectations among master鈥檚 students in other programs at the University. In the coming year, she hopes to have her first early results.