MyLife: Interplay of work, family, and leisure

2012-2015

German-speaking Switzerland, primarily Zurich.

In the last decades, the interface between different life domains has become an issue in society as well as in science. This study focused on the conflict between work and family in association with health and well-being. Because work and family don’t cover all aspects of life (for example sports, hobbies, or recovering), a further life domain was considered in this study: leisure.

Results suggest that subjective well-being and goal relations (lower conflict, higher facilitation among goals) profit from an integration of multiple life domains. In contrast, incongruity between content (activities, thoughts) and context (location) seems to be detrimental for subjective-well being and goal relations of middle-aged adults. Time-lagged analyses showed that momentary goal conflict was positively related to subsequent optimization and compensation, and momentary goal facilitation led to lower subsequent loss-based selection and compensation. In contrast, SOC predicted neither subsequent goal conflict nor facilitation.