Micro work‐family decision‐making of dual‐income couples with young children: What does a couple like us do in a situation like this?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The goal of this study was to address the following research question: How do couples with young children make micro work‐family decisions? Using a qualitative approach, we interviewed 29 couples, both together and apart, about work‐family decision‐making, including common routines (work hours, childcare/school drop‐offs, and pickups) and daily decisions (dealing with sick kids and unexpected work). We analysed over 200 decisions using thematic and critical incident analysis, and came to understand the stories in our data from the lens of decision logics. We observed that different types of couples made different choices because they had different rules for appropriate behaviour guiding their decisions. This way of making decisions is consistent with the logic of appropriateness model of decision‐making, in which decisions are made by following rules that are derived from identity construals. We observed that couples’ rules emanated from their joint family identity construals, rather than their individual construals. This is a novel finding that drives theory on decision‐making forward by showing how this decision logic can apply when couples are the decision‐making unit. Practically, our results can be applied to broaden employers’ awareness of how work and family responsibilities can be met by different employees and to increase couples’ knowledge of alternative approaches. Practitioner points Employees who are part of dual‐income couples make work‐family decisions based on their family identities, but there are numerous ways to construe family identities and employers should not assume that all men see their family roles as providers, nor do all women see their family roles as caregivers. Employers should welcome employees’ suggestions about how they can best complete their work and should recognize that employees can be creative when it comes to managing work and family demands. Employers should promote a more open environment in which employees and managers can discuss their work and family situations, and how they approach meeting family demands. Interventions could be designed to help dual‐income couples increase their own understanding of their family identities and their awareness of different ways to be a dual‐income couple.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".