Who?

There is no doubt that conducting a multi-national or cross-cultural work–family study is a challenging endeavor. One of the first issues to be addressed when attempting such a feat is who will be sampled or included in such a study across nations. To date, scholars have advocated minimizing differences across samples by constraining them to particular jobs or occupations in order to better isolate and observe the effects of culture (Lytle, Brett, Barsness, Tinsley, & Janssens, Reference Lytle, Brett, Barsness, Tinsley and Janssens1995; Spector, Liu, & Sanchez, Reference Spector, Liu and Sanchez2015). Although doing so does allow for better isolation of cultural effects, it has also resulted in the side effect that much of the cross-cultural literature documents differences between a very specific segment of the workforce, namely managers or other professional workers, mimicking the sampling focus of the broader work–family literature (Casper, Eby, Bordeaux, Lockwood, & Lambert, Reference Casper, Eby, Bordeaux, Lockwood and Lambert2007).

Given that managers may have greater experiences in interacting with individuals from other cultures within the organizational setting, focusing on managerial samples may contribute to underestimating cultural effects on work–family experiences. That is, managers’ mere exposure to diverse cultural contexts may make the influence of their own culture less impactful. Alternatively, it could be argued that perhaps culture may exert larger effects on managerial employees, given that they have more autonomy in decision-making compared to lower-level employees, who may simply have to act in a given way that is embedded within their local cultural norms and rules. If this is the case, the focus on managers may be causing us to generally overestimate the impact of culture on work–family experiences. Furthermore, multi-national organizations have been fruitful ground for the study of cross-national work–family experiences, yet by their global nature, these contexts may obscure or magnify cross-cultural variation. Thus, we generally caution researchers to more carefully consider to what extent our knowledge of cross-cultural differences in work–family experiences may generalize to all (or even most) workers within a given national or cultural setting and the trade-offs between specificity and generalizability when making sampling decisions.

Research on cultural or structural effects on work–family experiences to date have almost exclusively been focused on the national level-of-analysis. However, as evidenced by several chapters within this Handbook, this does not necessarily have to be the case; unique sub-cultures may exist or structures, such as laws and policies, may differ across geographic regions (e.g., states or provinces) within a national culture and this may reflect another opportunity to study the impact of the broader context on work–family dynamics. These variations within a culture have generally been ignored or treated as error in prior cross-cultural work–family research, but we encourage future work to capitalize on such variation to shed light on cultural influences on work–family processes. This approach also has the added benefit that a scholar interested in cultural effects may be able conduct a work–family study without having to connect with and organize efforts among a number of scholars in different countries. A spotlight on within-culture variation also highlights that scholars should consider whether such sub-cultures have typically been represented in existing cross-cultural work–family research (e.g., has existing research mainly sampled majority group members?) or the possibility that general patterns and trends regarding work–family variables may not hold for some portion of the population.

What?

Within the sphere of work–family experiences, cross-cultural research has most commonly focused on the construct of work–family conflict, in line with the broader literature. Thus, less is currently known regarding cross-cultural similarities and differences – either mean differences or moderating effects – for other work–family related variables, including work–family enrichment/facilitation, work–family balance, and segmentation-integration preferences. We encourage future research to pursue these questions, as the impact of culture or context on these variables and relationships may differ substantially from those uncovered for conflict and are important to understand in their own right.

In the literature and in several of the chapters in the current Handbook, there has been discussion that WFC – or other work–family variables – may have a different meaning across different cultural contexts. Several authors invoked a study by Grzywacz et al. (Reference Grzywacz, Arcury, Marin, Carrillo, Burke, Coates and Quandt2007), who found that immigrant Latino workers who were employed in the poultry processing industry reported low levels of work–family conflict when completing quantitative survey measures, but qualitative interviews suggested that conflict was a significant concern for these workers. Thus, this mismatch between quantitative and qualitative measures of conflict may indicate that nuances or the full meaning regarding work–family experiences may be lost when only examining quantitative measures, at least for certain subgroups or sub-cultures. Nonetheless, the majority of cross-cultural research employs only quantitative measures and only a minority of studies have engaged in measurement invariance testing to demonstrate that scores can be interpreted equivalently across cultural contexts (Shockley, Douek, Smith, Yu, Dumani, & French, Reference Shockley, Douek, Smith, Yu, Dumani and French2017). Unfortunately, Grzywacz et al.’s study suggests that even if quantitative scores are found to be statistically equivalent across cultural groups, they may not tell the whole picture regarding individuals’ work–family experiences. Thus, we encourage future work–family research to further explore how workers interpret and understand these experiences and constructs across cultures, which may necessitate greater use of qualitative methods and attempts to directly assess and compare workers’ response processes when completing quantitative measures rather than relying only on the resultant scores.

When?

Scholars have complained that work–family research has been “divorced from temporally sensitive theories” (Matthews, Wayne, & Ford, Reference Matthews, Wayne and Ford2014, p. 1173). Although the authors were mainly speaking to relationships between work–family conflict and subjective well-being outcomes, we would argue that this statement applies broadly to work–family research, including work on cultural influences. We strongly encourage future cross-cultural work–family research to consider issues of timing, both as it refers to individuals’ lifespan development and a culture’s evolution. For example, although developmental approaches have been used to understand individuals’ careers on the work side (e.g., Savickas, Reference Savickas2001) and both romantic relationships and parenting on the family side (e.g., Cassidy, Reference Cassidy2000; Umberson & Gove, Reference Umberson and Gove1989), we argue that a developmental approach that takes into account issues such as age or life stage has been underutilized in the work–family literature (see Erickson, Martinengo, & Hill, Reference Erickson, Martinengo and Hill2010, and Allen & Finkelstein, Reference Allen and Finkelstein2014, for recent exceptions). Furthermore, to our knowledge, research has not explored how culture may alter relationships between age or life stage and work–family experiences, which may be a fruitful area for future research.

On the cultural side, although research capturing the influence of culture on work–family variables reflect a snapshot in time, little research acknowledges this fact. In other words, researchers appear to assume that culture is relatively immutable and that findings around the impact of culture on work–family variables or relationships within a given culture will remain stable and generalizable over time. However, macro-level factors such as global economic conditions may influence, through either amplifying or depressing, observed cultural differences in work–family experiences. Alternatively, although cultural change may generally and historically be slow, there are specific regions of the world currently undergoing rapid changes in diverse domains (e.g., climate, economic development) that may have important consequences for our understanding of both culture and work–family issues. One exemplary work that has taken this into consideration is a theoretical paper by Trefalt, Drnovsek, Svetina-Nabergoj, and Adlesic (Reference Trefalt, Drnovsek, Svetina-Nabergoj and Adlesic2013) that focuses on the societal and economic transitions occurring in countries that shifted from socialist to capitalist after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The authors highlight the fact that these cultural shifts may not only affect patterns of relationships observed before and after the changes occurred, but the change variable in and of itself (i.e., living in a rapidly changing society) may function as a meaningful cultural variable. The fall of the Berlin Wall is admittedly a world event with cascading impacts, and such events are not commonplace. However, smaller events within single countries, such as the legalization of same-sex marriages in the United States by the Supreme Court in 2015, could also be important markers against which to study temporal work–family dynamics.

Where?

We echo calls by other scholars that cross-cultural research on work–family issues should more carefully consider the sampling of countries (Shockley et al., Reference Shockley, Douek, Smith, Yu, Dumani and French2017; Spector et al., Reference Spector, Liu and Sanchez2015). Given the difficulty of conducting multi-national or cross-cultural research, the inclusion of many countries in multi-country datasets appears to be due more to convenience and access than purposive sampling choices. We encourage future research to more carefully consider the sampling of countries in order to ensure variation on cultural dimensions or social structures (e.g., laws and policies) of interest as well as to minimize potential confounds. Moreover, as evidenced by the reviews in this volume, there is a general lack of research on work–family issues in Africa and the Middle East. Without gaining an understanding of how the work–family interface functions within these cultures, it is difficult to take the next step in making cross-cultural comparisons. Furthermore, existing research attention on cultural dimensions that influence work–family experiences has tended to focus heavily on individualism-collectivism; we encourage scholars to consider other relevant cultural factors (e.g., humane orientation, tightness-looseness) that may also have implications for work–family relations, particularly those outside of Hofstede and GLOBE’s ground-breaking cultural models, which tend to dominate this area of inquiry.

Returning to a cultures-within-culture perspective, one key dimension of variation within cultures that may also serve to bridge research across cultures, is the urban-rural divide. Urban and rural communities can be found in many developed and developing nations worldwide (e.g., Africa, China, and United States) and thus represents an understudied but likely important contextual factor. The urban-rural divide is likely important to understand work–family dynamics as it likely affects the types of jobs available within the community, access to resources and public programs (e.g., childcare), prevalence of different family structures, and numerous other factors that shape one’s work, family, and work–family interactions. Future research should thus examine how living within urban, suburban, or rural communities may affect individuals’ and families’ work–family experiences and management within and across cultures.

Why?

We view issues of “why” as amongst the most critical issues to tackle in order for cross-cultural work–family research to progress. Collecting or finding multi-country datasets is challenging; thus, it is not surprising that, at times, it seems that theorizing is outstripping empirical testing in cross-cultural work–family research. However, a recent review by Shockley et al. (Reference Shockley, Douek, Smith, Yu, Dumani and French2017) reveals that this complex network of theorizing has led to a literature with theoretical predictions that often contradict each other. As an example, some scholars have argued that cultural collectivism (vs. individualism) should be negatively related to work–family conflict because work is viewed as beneficial to family and thus the two roles are therefore complementary (e.g., Galovan et al., Reference Galovan, Fackrell, Buswell, Jones, Hill and Carroll2010), or because collectivistic cultures are less likely to encourage long work hours that tend to increase the likelihood of conflict given their lower emphasis on competition (e.g., Aycan, Reference Aycan, Korabik and Lero2008). In contrast, other scholars have argued that cultural collectivism (vs. individualism) should be associated with greater work–family conflict as family demands should be greater in collectivistic cultures since one’s view of family is broader (e.g., includes obligations to extended family), creating more opportunities for conflict to arise (Oishi et al., Reference Oishi, Chan, Wang and Kim2015).

In order to disentangle and sort out these theoretical and conceptual issues, cross-cultural work–family research will need to move beyond current practices. For example, rather than simply imputing cultural values and observing mean differences or moderating effects, researchers will need to directly measure and assess posited mediating mechanisms that underlie cultural differences (e.g., in the example above, measuring both work hours and family demands). Strong and direct tests of competing hypotheses in this literature are also needed. Furthermore, it appears that culture’s effects are often complex, as some cultural dimensions may simultaneously influence factors that are protective and harmful to work–family experiences, requiring the assessment and consideration of multiple mediating pathways simultaneously. By tackling these challenges head on, these efforts should help to shed light on existing inconsistencies in the literature and clarify “why” culture affects work–family variables.

How?

How will we as a field accomplish these goals given the complexity and challenge inherent in conducting cross-cultural work–family research? The way forward almost certainly requires innovative thinking and new strategies and approaches. For example, one of the biggest barriers to cross-cultural work–family research is access to multi-country data. One way to address this issue might be the creation of a public database, where work–family researchers from around the world could upload anonymized data that identifies country (or other important contextual information) for their datasets to facilitate secondary data analysis. Of course, for such an approach to succeed, researchers will need to rethink “ownership” of data, and incentives would need to be put in place to encourage participation and use. However, we argue that there would be numerous benefits for such a data repository; it would greatly facilitate research in this domain, particularly research that requires access to primary data. For example, although meta-analytic methods can be used to accumulate means and correlational findings, such that the direct effect of culture (or cultural variables) and the moderating effect of culture can be relatively easily estimated from data reported in the literature, it would be difficult (if not impossible) to estimate and cumulate the effect of culture in more complex models (e.g., how culture moderates the interactive relationship between gender AND parental status on work–family conflict) without access to primary data.

A tension that exists within the work–family literature is the decision to use quantitative versus qualitative methods. Although quantitative or survey assessments of work–family variables are extremely common in the literature, particularly in cross-cultural work, these measures have been critiqued in that they may provide limited insight into individuals’ rich and complex work and family lives and experiences as lived compared to qualitative methods. The latter, of course, suffers from other limitations, such as greater potential subjectivity and difficulties in making direct comparisons between participants and cultures. To reconcile and better capitalize on the strengths of each approach, we encourage future cross-cultural work–family research to more commonly employ mixed-methods designs. For reference, readers may turn to Yang, Chen, Choi, and Zou (Reference Yang, Chen, Choi and Zou2000) and Joplin, Shaffer, Francesco, and Lau (Reference Joplin, Shaffer, Francesco and Lau2003); both represent worthy examples of combining qualitative and quantitative methodologies within a single paper.

Generally, we strongly encourage the exploration of new potential sources of data and methodologies. For example, how can work–family researchers capitalize on the big data trend to examine cross-cultural questions? Might social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram be mined to generate insights regarding work–family dynamics? For example, to what extent do workers post about work issues during non-work time or family issues during work hours? Does this differ across cultures? Do these actions provide scholars with insight into the segmentation-integration practices of workers globally? Similarly, one difficulty often encountered with qualitative methods is that the unstructured data that results requires substantial amounts of effort and time in order to organize, code, and interpret. Thus, most qualitative studies, including those on work–family topics, are based on relatively small samples. Might new methodologies, such as machine learning algorithms that can learn to mimic human coders, be used to handle and code larger samples, including cross-cultural samples, of qualitative data? Technology has opened a brave new world; we believe that many opportunities lie ahead for cross-cultural work–family scholars who are able to identify and make use of these new data sources or creatively apply emerging data analytic techniques.

Final Thoughts

Serving as editors of this Handbook has been a great honor for us. We have greatly enjoyed and appreciated the opportunity to work with scholars from around the globe who have generously contributed their time and knowledge to this Handbook as well as dedicated their careers to generating critical knowledge regarding the work–family issues faced by workers, their families, and their organizations globally. This Handbook documents how far the field has come in a short time, and we hope that its contents may serve as a valuable source of both information and inspiration for both researchers and practitioners into the future as we each continue to tackle, both personally and professionally, the challenges of managing complex work and family lives within a constantly evolving, interconnected, and global context.