Off-campus WSU users: To download campus access dissertations, please use the following link to log into our proxy server with your WSU access ID and password, then click the "Off-campus Download" button below.

Non-WSU users: Please talk to your librarian about requesting this dissertation through interlibrary loan.

Access Type

WSU Access

Date of Award

January 2023

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Department

Psychology

First Advisor

Marcus W. Dickson

Abstract

Allusions to a concrete spatial-temporal boundary between work and home are common in published self-report measures of work-family conflict (e.g., “arrive home from work”, “when I get home from work”, “go to work late”). This is unsurprising given that expressions indicating the physical and temporal separation of “work” and “home” have historically pervaded common parlance (e.g., “I’m at work vs. at home” or “I’m going to work vs. going home”). The lexical co-occurrence of word pairings in writings and spoken language is well-predicted by cognitive and linguistic theorizing on the socio-cultural construction of language (e.g., Marmaridou, 2000, 2011), reflecting a prolonged time in human history where work was predominantly conducted outside of the home (Davies & Frink, 2014). In these phrases, the English location preposition “at” and the verb “to go” position work and home as discrete entities in physical and social space. Published evidence suggests that published psychological measures using these linguistic devices to demarcate work and home as discrete geographic locations are uniformly understood, relevant, and appropriate for use with face-to-face workers (i.e., individuals who work outside of the home and thus, commute to work). However, there is warranted concern that psychological measures containing this language may be ambiguous and idiosyncratically interpreted by remote workers (Hardy & Ford, 2014) due to the spatial decoupling of work activities from a formal work location outside of the home for remote workers. Against this backdrop, I investigated whether there are any systematic response differences with a recently published behavioral measure of work-family conflict: Clark et al.'s (2019) Work-Family Behavioral Role Conflict scale (WFBRC-S). This scale was selected to undergo rigorous item adjudication for two reasons: (a) the authors admit that this assessment is sensitive to sample characteristics, and (b) seven of the 30 items demarcate work and home as discrete geographic locations. Across two studies, mixed support was found for the proposition that WFRBC-S items that demarcate work and home as discrete geographic locations engender usability concerns on the part of home-based remote workers (i.e., individuals who work from home exclusively or most of the time) but not traditional face-to-face workers (i.e., individuals who perform their job duties on-site/in-person at an approved worksite). In Study 1, remote and face-to-face naïve raters indicated little to no comprehension concerns with the seven focal WFBRC-S items. In Study 2, subject matter experts (SMEs) assigned to evaluate the WFBRC-S items from the perspective of home-based remote workers indicated some to extensive comprehension concerns with the focal WFRBC-S items, whereas SMEs assigned to evaluate the WFBRC-S items from the perspective of face-to-face workers indicated no to some item-level comprehension concerns. Given past evidence that SMEs are more prone to successfully identify comprehension concerns with survey items compared to naïve raters, SMEs indicated comprehension concerns with the WFBRC-S items were given more weight when deriving recommendations for theory and practice. Based upon amassed substantive validity evidence, scale developers and users are encouraged to avoid or rephrase concrete allusions to a spatial-temporal boundary between work and home when developing new or adapting published survey items for use with remote worker populations. Limitations and future directions related to this program of research are discussed.

Download
Off-campus Download

Share

COinS