Publications by Author: Lynne M. Casper

2015
McHale SM, Davis KD, Green K, Casper LM, Kan M, Kelly EL, King RB, Okechukwu CA. Effects of a Workplace Intervention on Parent–Child Relationships. Journal of Child and Family Studies. 2015 :1-9. Publisher's VersionAbstract

This study tested whether effects of a workplace intervention, aimed at promoting employees’ schedule control and supervisor support for personal and family life, had implications for parent–adolescent relationships; we also tested whether parent–child relationships differed as a function of how many intervention program sessions participants attended. Data came from a group randomized trial of a workplace intervention, delivered in the information technology division of a Fortune 500 company. Analyses focused on 125 parent–adolescent dyads that completed baseline and 12-month follow-up home interviews. Results revealed no main effects of the intervention, but children of employees who attended 75 % or more program sessions reported more time with their parent and more parent education involvement compared to adolescents whose parents attended <75 % of sessions, and they tended to report more time with parent and more parental solicitation of information about their experiences compared to adolescents whose parents were randomly assigned to the usual practice condition.

McHale SM, Lawson KM, Davis KD, Casper LM, Kelly EL, Buxton OM. Effects of a Workplace Intervention on Sleep in Employees' Children. Journal of Adolescent Health. 2015;56 (6) : 672–677. Publisher's VersionAbstract

Purpose
The implications of sleep patterns for adolescent health are well established, but we know less about larger contextual influences on youth sleep. We focused on parents' workplace experiences as extrafamilial forces that may affect youth sleep.
Methods
In a group-randomized trial focused on employee work groups in the information technology division of a Fortune 500 company, we tested whether a workplace intervention improved sleep latency, duration, night-to-night variability in duration, and quality of sleep of employees' offspring, aged 9–17 years. The intervention was aimed at promoting employees' schedule control and supervisor support for personal and family life to decrease employees' work–family conflict and thereby promote the health of employees, their families, and the work organization. Analyses focused on 93 parent–adolescent dyads (57 dyads in the intervention and 46 in the comparison group) that completed baseline and 12-month follow-up home interviews and a series of telephone diary interviews that were conducted on eight consecutive evenings at each wave.
Results
Intent-to-treat analyses of the diary interview data revealed main effects of the intervention on youth's sleep latency, night-to-night variability in sleep duration, and sleep quality, but not sleep duration.
Conclusions

The intervention focused on parents' work conditions, not on their parenting or parent–child relationships, attesting to the role of larger contextual influences on youth sleep and the importance of parents' work experiences in the health of their children.

Davis KD, Lawson KM, Almeida DM, Davis KD, King RB, Hammer LB, Casper LM, Okechukwu CA, Hanson GC, McHale SM. Parent's daily time with their children: A workplace intervention. Pediatrics. 2015. Publisher's VersionAbstract

OBJECTIVES: In the context of a group randomized field trial, we evaluated whether parents who participated in a workplace intervention, designed to increase supervisor support for personal and family life and schedule control, reported significantly more daily time with their children at the 12-month follow-up compared with parents assigned to the Usual Practice group. We also tested whether the intervention effect was moderated by parent gender, child gender, or child age.

METHODS: The Support-Transform-Achieve-Results Intervention was delivered in an information technology division of a US Fortune 500 company. Participants included 93 parents (45% mothers) of a randomly selected focal child aged 9 to 17 years (49% daughters) who completed daily telephone diaries at baseline and 12 months after intervention. During evening telephone calls on 8 consecutive days, parents reported how much time they spent with their child that day.

RESULTS: Parents in the intervention group exhibited a significant increase in parent-child shared time, 39 minutes per day on average, between baseline and the 12-month follow-up. By contrast, parents in the Usual Practice group averaged 24 fewer minutes with their child per day at the 12-month follow-up. Intervention effects were evident for mothers but not for fathers and for daughters but not sons.

CONCLUSIONS: The hypothesis that the intervention would improve parents’ daily time with their children was supported. Future studies should examine how redesigning work can change the quality of parent-child interactions and activities known to be important for youth health and development.

Moen P, Kaduk A, Kossek EE, Hammer LB, Buxton OM, O'Donnell EM, Almeida DM, Fox K, Tranby E, Oakes JM, et al. Is Work-family Conflict a Multilevel Stressor Linking Job Conditions to Mental Health? Evidence from the Work, Family and Health Network. In: Research in the Sociology of Work. Vol. 26. Bingley, West Yorkshire, England: Emerald Group Publishing Limited ; 2015. pp. pp.177 - 217. Publisher's VersionAbstract

Purpose: Most research on the work conditions and family responsibilities associated with work-family conflict and other measures of mental health uses the individual employee as the unit of analysis. We argue that work conditions are both individual psychosocial assessments and objective characteristics of the proximal work environment, necessitating multilevel analyses of both individual- and team-level work conditions on mental health.
Methodology/approach: This study uses multilevel data on 748 high-tech professionals in 120 teams to investigate relationships between team- and individual-level job conditions, work-family conflict, and four mental health outcomes (job satisfaction, emotional exhaustion, perceived stress, and psychological distress).
Findings: We find that work-to-family conflict is socially patterned across teams, as are job satisfaction and emotional exhaustion. Team-level job conditions predict team-level outcomes, while individuals’ perceptions of their job conditions are better predictors of individuals’ work-to-family conflict and mental health. Work-to-family conflict operates as a partial mediator between job demands and mental health outcomes.
Practical implications: Our findings suggest that organizational leaders concerned about presenteeism, sickness absences, and productivity would do well to focus on changing job conditions in ways that reduce job demands and work-to-family conflict in order to promote employees’ mental health.
Originality/value of the chapter: We show that both work-to-family conflict and job conditions can be fruitfully framed as team characteristics, shared appraisals held in common by team members. This challenges the framing of work-to-family conflict as a “private trouble” and provides support for work-to-family conflict as a structural mismatch grounded in the social and temporal organization of work.

2014
Kelly EL, Moen P, Oakes JM, Fan W, Okechukwu CA, Davis KD, Hammer LB, Kossek EE, King RB, Hanson GC, et al. Changing Work and Work-Family Conflict: Evidence from the Work, Family, and Health Network. American Sociological Review. 2014;79 (3) :485-516. Publisher's VersionAbstract

Schedule control and supervisor support for family and personal life may help employees manage the work-family interface. Existing data and research designs, however, have made it difficult to conclusively identify the effects of these work resources. This analysis utilizes a group-randomized trial in which some units in an information technology workplace were randomly assigned to participate in an initiative, called STAR, that targeted work practices, interactions, and expectations by (1) training supervisors on the value of demonstrating support for employees’ personal lives and (2) prompting employees to reconsider when and where they work. We find statistically significant, although modest, improvements in employees’ work-family conflict and family time adequacy, and larger changes in schedule control and supervisor support for family and personal life. We find no evidence that this intervention increased work hours or perceived job demands, as might have happened with increased permeability of work across time and space. Subgroup analyses suggest the intervention brought greater benefits to employees more vulnerable to work-family conflict. This study uses a rigorous design to investigate deliberate organizational changes and their effects on work resources and the work-family interface, advancing our understanding of the impact of social structures on individual lives.

2012
King RB, Karuntzos GT, Casper LM, Moen P, Davis KD, Berkman LF, Durham M, Kossek EE. Work-Family Balance Issues and Work-Leave Policies. In: Handbook of Occupational Health and Wellness. New York, NY: Springer ; 2012. pp. 323-339.