1. What is the Work-Family Area of Study
What is the Work-Family Area of Study? Module 2, Class 1 A Teaching Module Developed by the Curriculum Task Force of the Sloan Work and Family Research Network

2. How does the multi-disciplinary nature of the work-family field contribute to the knowledge base?
What is knowledge?
What is the knowledge base?

3. What disciplines have contributed to the work-family area of study?
Anthropology
Business & Management
Economics
Education
Family and Children’s Studies
Gerontology
Industrial Relations
Law
Medicine
Political Science
Psychology
Social Work
Sociology
Women’s Studies

4. What is multi-disciplinarity?
Determined by the degree to which the knowledge has been generated from scholars trained in the theory, empirical studies, and methods of different disciplines

5. Advantages and challenges of multi-disciplinarity
Rich understandings emerge
Work-family issues become more salient in the academy
Difficulty keeping up with publications outside own discipline
Difficult to establish networks of scholars

6. Accessing the work-family knowledge base
Challenges:
Scholarly databases organized by discipline
Need to search multiple databases
* Sloan Network’s Literature Database- Contains work-family literature from multiple disciplines.

7. History of the Work-family Area of Study
1977 Kanter monograph: Work and family in the United States: A critical review and agenda for research and policy
“Institutionalized” as a distinct area of scholarship
Identifiable and distinct focus
Founded on theory, connected to empirical research
Structures established for building knowledge
Community of knowledge builders

8. Work-Family Timelines
The Sloan Network website hosts several timelines of the work-family area of study:

9. Connections between Theory and Research (and Research and Theory)
Theory Used to
Formulate
Research
Questions and
Guide Selection/ Measurement of
Variables
Findings of
Research
Contribute to
Theory
Building or
Refinement of
Existing Theory
Theory
Subsequent Research
Replicates Earlier Studies
and Confirms, Refines, or
Refutes Earlier Findings.
Theory used to help interpret
findings.