Family and Work: What Does it Mean? A Cross-Cultural Study on Work and Family Representations and its Impact on the Work-Family Centrality
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The way individuals conceptualize and value work and family plays a crucial role in shaping identity and guiding personal and professional priorities. This descriptive-correlational and cross-cultural study aimed to analyze the centrality attributed to work and family, as well as to explore the social representations associated with these two domains. Samples were collected from Canada ( n = 77), India ( n = 201), Oman ( n = 175), Portugal ( n = 340) and Spain ( n = 102), totaling 895 participants. Participants provided demographic information, completed the Work–Family Centrality Scale, and evoked three words related to “family” and “work” through a free association task. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was used to identify latent dimensions of representation, and cluster analysis grouped participants into six distinct symbolic profiles. Results confirmed cultural differences in work–family centrality, with participants from Portugal and Spain prioritizing family, and participants from India attributing greater centrality to work. Gender differences were small and not statistically significant. Representational clusters were meaningfully associated with both country and centrality scores, indicating that the symbolic configuration of work and family informs how individuals prioritize these roles in their identity. This study highlights the value of integrating identity theory and Social Representations Theory to understand how personal and cultural meanings shape work–family dynamics.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".