Work and Leisure

Stress and working parents 149In the 500 Family Study, to the extent that it was possible, members of thesame family were put on identical signalling schedules. In response to thesignals, participants were asked to complete a self-report form in which theyanswered a number of open-ended and scaled questions about their location,activities, companions, and psychological states at the moment they weresignalled. A number of Likert and semantic-differential scales were used toassess participants’ psychological states. Trained coders, using detailedschemes, coded the open-ended responses. Inter-rater reliabilities on theESM coding ranged from 0.79 to 0.95. For a more detailed description ofthis methodology, as well as several descriptions of its validity and reliability,see Csikszentmihalyi and Larson (1987) and Csikszentmihalyi and Schneider(2000).Surveys and interviewsThe surveys were specifically designed to learn how working families arecoping with their lives. To gain information about work and family life, surveysadministered to parents and teenage children included demographicinformation as well as items pertaining to home, work, and school experiences,and views about self. The in-depth interviews explored many of thesurvey topics in greater detail, trying specifically to understand how familiescope with the stress and demands of two working parents with children underthe age of eighteen in the household. For this chapter, we specifically focuson the relationship between levels of stress and husbands’ and wives’ occupationalstatus, educational background, job type, attitudes toward work, jobsatisfaction, and marital satisfaction.ResultsExperiencing stressUsing ESM beep responses obtained over the course of a week, we computeda mean level of stress for each individual. In our first analysis, we examine therelationship between stress and other emotions, including relaxation, enjoyment,self-esteem, feeling good, feeling strong, feeling happy, and feelingexcited.As shown in Table 8.1, stress is negatively correlated with the positiveemotional states of happiness, enjoyment, and feeling good and strong. Thehighest negative relationship is found between stress and relaxation, whereasthe least negative correlation is found for excitement. These results seem validsince individuals who are stressed are likely to feel uncomfortably anxiouswith themselves. They are also likely to feel slightly excited, although wewould expect that higher levels of excitement would occur when they areengaged in activities that are more pleasurable. Finally, we find that stress is