Bringing It All Back Home: How Outside Stressors Shape Families' Everyday Lives

ABSTRACT— Families are dynamic systems that are permeable to influences from the outside world, such as daily stressors at work and at school. Our research uses naturalistic methods to investigate how family interactions change in response to such experiences and how other family members contribute to that process. We argue that the short-term effects of daily stressors on family dynamics can have cumulative, long-term implications for family health and functioning. Naturalistic studies that incorporate daily diary, observational, and physiological measures can offer new insights into families' everyday stress responding and coping processes.     

EARLY HEAD START FAMILIES’ EXPERIENCES WITH STRESS: UNDERSTANDING VARIATIONS WITHIN A HIGH‐RISK,LOW‐INCOME SAMPLE

The federal Early Head Start program provides a relevant context to examine families’ experiences with stress since participants qualify on the basis of poverty and risk. Building on previous research that has shown variations in demographic and economic risks even among qualifying families, we examined possible variations in families’ perceptions of stress. Family, parent, and child data were collected to measure stressors and risk across a variety of domains in families’ everyday lives, primarily from self‐report measures, but also including assay results from child cortisol samples. A cluster analysis was employed to examine potential differences among groups of Early Head Start families. Results showed that there were three distinct subgroups of families, with some families perceiving that they experienced very high levels of stress while others perceived much lower levels of stress despite also experiencing poverty and heightened risk. These findings have important implications in that they provide an initial step toward distinguishing differences in low‐income families’ experiences with stress, thereby informing interventions focused on promoting responsive caregiving as a possible mechanism to buffer the effects of family and social stressors on young children.     

Millennials’ (Lack of) Attitude Problem: An Empirical Examination of Generational Effects on Work Attitudes

Purpose  

The purpose of this study is to contribute to the sparse empirical literature on generational differences at work by examining (1) the effect of generation on work attitudes (e.g., job satisfaction, job security, and turnover intentions) and (2) how Millennials’ work attitudes differ from prior generations.