Colloquium Series – Practice Job Talk: Jane Lee, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Work-Family Orientations in Emerging Adulthood: How Young Women Combine Partnering, Parenting, Education, and Work

Young women come to the transition to adulthood with a set of ideas about how life should and might turn out to be.  Among these ideas are schemas that frame young women’s expectations for how their education, work, and family lives are to unfold.  Studies often focus on these realms of life separately, but in fact, young women jointly consider ideas about work and family, particularly in competing and sometimes conflicting ways (Johnson-Hanks et al. 2011). In this paper, I use data from the Relationship Dynamics and Social Life study to conduct a latent class analysis of the unique combinations of young women’s attitudes, expectations, and identities related to pregnancy, marriage, education, and work. I refer to these unique combinations of schemas as work-family orientations, and identify four prominent types of work-family orientations in the transition to adulthood. Using covariate and multi-group analyses, I examine how these work-family orientations vary by demographic, socioeconomic, and religious characteristics.