Balancing Family with Academic Responsibilities: Empowerment, Community, Stress, and Life Satisfaction

Background and Purpose: It is important for opportunities to exist within the social work academic community for talented scholars to continue their academic career while also caring for family members including children, life partners, and aging parents.  Although some are able to transgress a smooth liner path through a tenure-stream academic career; this often requires compromises in various life domains (Evans et al., 2008; Ward & Wolf-Wendel, 2012).  Others follow non-linear academic career paths, which can encompass a variety of opportunities including non-tenure positions, on-line education, time off, and/or non-academic jobs (Wolfinger et al., 2009).  Despite the importance of work-life decisions to success across all life domains (de Saxe Zerden et al., 2015; Vakalahi & Starks, 2010), very little published research addresses these issues within the social work academic community.  Thus, the purpose of the current study is to improve understanding about how caretaker roles and career paths affect personal sense of empowerment, community, stress, and life satisfaction among a sample of social workers pursuing academic careers. To address this empirical gap, the following research questions were explored:

RQ1: Do family caretaker responsibilities differ for social work academics along different stages of linear and non-linear academic career paths?

RQ2: Is there a relationship between the career path taken by social work academics and sense of work-place empowerment, connectedness to the social work academic community, stress level, and life satisfaction across professional and personal domains?

RQ3: Does the relationship between caretaker responsibilities and academic career path affect work-place empowerment, connectedness to the social work academic community, stress level, and life satisfaction across professional and personal domains?

Method: An on-line survey was administered to academics working in accredited social work programs in the United States.  The sample included 918 participants (709 women, 208 men, and 1 identified as a “Transexual Man”) recruited through a mixture of invitation and snowball sampling.  Variables were measured using the Menon Empowerment Scale (Menon, 2001), the Brief Sense of Community Scale (Peterson, Speer, & McMillan, 2008), two 11-point satisfaction scales (Eurobarometer, 2008), the 4-item Brief Stress Scale (Cohen et al., 1983; Cohen & Williamson, 1988), and survey items designed for this study.

Results:  ANOVAs were used to address RQ1 and RQ2.  Multiple regressions were used to address RQ3. RQ1: Comparisons between and within the linear and non-linear career path groups identified differences in both child and adult caretaking responsibilities. RQ2: A relationship between career path taken by social work academics and the included variables found differences in some, but not all of the comparisons.  RQ3: The relationship between caretaker responsibilities and academic career paths identified differences in some, but not all of the regression models.

Conclusion/Implications: For social work academics to “ensure healthy development for all youth,” (SSWR, 2017) they must first find ways to continue their academic career while balancing caretaker responsibilities.   Preliminary findings of the current study indicate the way social work academics do so across the various academic career stages is a highly individual matter with personal and professional consequences.