Career-Family Attitudes Scale

Abstract

The Career-Family Attitudes scale, developed by Sanders, Lengnick-Hall, Lengnick-Hall, and Steele-Clapp in 1998, is a 50-item measure designed to assess employee attitudes regarding the management of the career and family interface. This instrument was specifically constructed to be gender neutral, capturing not only the respondent’s expectations for themselves but also their expectations concerning their spouse’s role in mitigating career-family conflict. The scale is multifaceted, encompassing six primary subscales: Family Focus, Balance, Career Focus, Dominance, Spousal Support, and Independence. These dimensions explore potential conflicts across career, household, and childcare responsibilities, and attitudes toward the equitable sharing of domestic and professional duties.

Keywords

Career-Family Attitudes scale, work-family conflict, gender roles, spousal support, organizational behavior, psychological measurement, career and family interface, work attitudes, employee expectations.

Authors

Sanders, M. M., Lengnick-Hall, M. L., Lengnick-Hall, C. A., Steele-Clapp, L.

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Career-Family Attitudes scale is to quantify and analyze the attitudes held by employees, particularly new entrants into the labor force, regarding the balance and conflict inherent in managing both professional careers and family life. It moves beyond traditional measures of work-family conflict by explicitly incorporating expectations placed upon a spouse or partner.

By assessing 50 distinct items, the measure aims to differentiate attitudes across various dimensions of domestic and professional life, including financial decision-making, child-rearing responsibilities, career prioritization, and the desire for independence within the relationship. The development was rooted in the need for a non-gender-biased instrument capable of capturing complex, dual-career family expectations prevalent in contemporary work environments.

Construct

The scale measures an individual’s psychological construct related to expected roles, responsibilities, and prioritization within the context of a potential two-career household. The construct is broken down into six distinct attitudinal dimensions, which collectively define the individual’s stance on the career-family interface:

• Family Focus: Measures the extent to which the respondent or their spouse defers professional matters in favor of family, household, or childcare responsibilities. This is further divided into “I defer” and “Someone defers” subscales.
• Balance: Assesses attitudes toward equal sharing of career commitment, financial control, and household duties between partners.
• Career Focus: Captures the belief that the respondent or spouse may, at times, prioritize professional demands over marital or familial relationships.
• Dominance: Reflects the respondent’s expectation of holding decision power within the household, often coupled with the expectation that the spouse will defer their career for childcare.
• Spousal Support: Measures the expectation that the spouse will actively support the respondent’s career, potentially through compromise (e.g., relocating) or managing household distractions.
• Independence: Addresses the extent to which the respondent expects themselves and their spouse to maintain separate social lives or vacation activities.

Validity

The validity of the Career-Family Attitudes scale was explored through correlational analysis, examining relationships between the subscales and external academic and demographic variables (Sanders et al., 1998). Specific findings demonstrated predictable patterns consistent with the constructs being measured.

For instance, the Family Focus subscale showed a negative correlation with both educational aspirations and grade point average (GPA), suggesting that those prioritizing family responsibilities tend to have lower academic goals. Conversely, Career Focus correlated positively with both educational aspirations and GPA. Demographic correlations also supported validity: Balance correlated negatively with male gender, while Dominance and Spousal Support correlated positively with male gender and, for Dominance, living in a rural setting, aligning with traditional gender role expectations.

Reliability

Internal consistency reliability was established using Coefficient alpha for each of the six subscales (Sanders et al., 1998). The resulting alpha values generally indicate acceptable to good reliability, particularly for the core focus areas:

• Family Focus: Coefficient alpha = .78
• Balance: Coefficient alpha = .78
• Career Focus: Coefficient alpha = .84
• Dominance: Coefficient alpha = .75
• Spousal Support: Coefficient alpha = .67
• Independence: The value was reported as acceptable, though the specific numeric value was omitted in the summary text provided.

The overall reliability statistics confirm that the majority of the subscales demonstrate acceptable internal consistency for use in research settings, with Career Focus being the most internally consistent.

Factor Analysis

Factor analysis performed on the 50 scale items confirmed the underlying structure of the instrument. The analysis successfully identified six primary factors, which correspond directly to the proposed subscales: Family Focus, Balance, Career Focus, Dominance, Spousal Support, and Independence.

Following the initial factor identification, the comprehensive Family Focus factor was further refined and separated into two specific subscales to capture nuanced differences in attitudes: the “I defer” subscale (measuring the respondent’s own deferral of career for family) and the “Someone defers” subscale (measuring the expectation that the spouse will defer their career for family). This refinement enhances the scale’s ability to measure differential role expectations.

Instrument

Test Type: Attitudinal/Psychometric Scale

Format: 50 self-report items utilizing a 7-point Likert-type scale.

Language Available: English (Original)

Population Group: Employees, specifically new entrants into the labor force (college students/young professionals).

Age Group: Adult (Young Adult/Emerging Workforce)

Population Details: The scale was initially validated on individuals preparing to enter the workforce, focusing on their projected attitudes toward managing work and family life.

Test Methodology: Respondents indicate their level of agreement or disagreement with statements using the 7-point scale, where 1 indicates strongly disagree and 7 indicates strongly agree. Scoring is achieved by summing or averaging responses across the specific subscales, with designated items being reverse-scored (R).

Keywords

Work-life balance, role expectations, gender roles, dual-career couples, organizational psychology, educational aspirations, GPA, factor analysis, psychometrics, attitude measurement.

Authors

Author ORCID Identifier: Not provided in source material.

Affiliation Email addresses: Not provided in source material.

Correspondence Address: Not provided in source material.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

Test Year: 1998

Permissions and Fees: The items were reproduced by permission of John Wiley & Sons Limited, as published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior. Researchers must contact the original authors or publisher for current usage permissions and associated fees.

Reference’s

Sanders, M. M., Lengnick-Hall, M. L., Lengnick-Hall, C. A., & Steele­ Clapp, L. (1998). Love and work: Career-family attitudes of new entrants into the labor force. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 19, 603-619. Items were taken from Appendix A, pp. 617-619. Copyright© 1998. Reproduced by permission of John Wiley & Sons Limited.

Items of the Career-Family Attitudes scale

Responses are obtained using a 7-point Likert-type scale where 1 = strongly disagree and 7 = strongly agree.

Family focus items (“I defer” subscale):

1. I expect to go as far as I can in my career and expect encouragement from my spouse (R)
2. I would like for my spouse to make most of the financial decisions regardless of who makes the most money
3. I do not expect to have a career
4. I would like for my spouse to have more education than I do
5. It would bother me a lot if I make more money than my spouse does
6. If my spouse and I can’t agree on something, I think I should most often give in to my spouse
7. I will be mostly responsible for raising our children, regardless of whether or not I work outside the home
8. If I do not work outside the home, I will do all the housework
9. I expect to stay home full-time with our children
10. My spouse’s career is more important than mine

Family focus items (“Someone defers” subscale):

1. Professional child care providers (day care, sitter) will take care of our children while my spouse and I work (R)
2. I expect that either my spouse or I will be home during the day with our children
3. Marriage and two careers do not mix
4. Children and two careers do not mix

Balance items:

1. I expect my spouse to be mostly responsible for raising our children, regardless of whether or not my spouse is employed (R)
2. If my spouse works outside the home, I will help somewhat with the housework
3. My career and my spouse’s career will be equally important
4. I expect my spouse and I to share responsibility for raising our children
5. I don’t care whether my spouse or I make the most money
6. If I am employed, I expect my spouse to help with the housework
7. I intend to encourage my spouse to fully develop his or her career
8. I would like my spouse and me to make financial decisions together regardless of how much money we each make
9. If both my spouse and I are employed, I expect housework to be a jointly shared responsibility
10. I would like to take some vacations with my spouse but no children

Career focus items:

1. I expect that there will be times when my spouse will have to pay more attention to job problems than to our relationship
2. Sometimes I will have to pay more attention to my job than to my family
3. I do not expect to ever have to pay more attention to my job than to my relationship with my spouse (R)
4. I expect that sometimes my spouse will have to pay more attention to his or her job than to our family
5. I expect there will be times when I will have to pay more attention to my job than to my relationship with my spouse
6. I expect that neither my spouse nor I will pay more attention to our careers than to our family (R)

Dominance items:

1. I expect my spouse to stay home full-time with our children
2. My spouse should be able to go to school as long as he or she wishes whether or not we have children (R)
3. It would bother me a lot if my spouse makes more money than I do
4. Yard work and fix-it tasks will mainly be done by me
5. My career will be more important than my spouse’s career
6. I would like my spouse and I to share yard work and fix-it tasks (R)
7. I do not expect my spouse to have a career
8. I would like to make most of the financial decisions regardless of how much money my spouse makes
9. I would like to have more education than my spouse

Spousal support items:

1. If my spouse and I can’t agree on something, I think my spouse should give in to me
2. If my spouse is not employed, he or she should do all the housework
3. If I get an excellent job offer elsewhere, I will expect my spouse to move to the new place
4. Weekends will be time for me to relax, watch TV, , and I expect my spouse to keep distractions (i.e., visitors, children, chores) to a minimum
5. Weekends will be time for my spouse to relax, watch TV, , and I expect to keep distractions (i.e., visitors, children, chores) to a minimum
6. Yard work and fix-it tasks will mainly be done by my spouse
7. Both on the job and at home, some tasks are “men’s work” and some tasks are “women’s work”

Independence items:

1. I expect my spouse to take some vacations alone
2. I would like to occasionally go out in the evening without my spouse
3. I would like to take some vacations by myself
4. I expect my spouse to occasionally go out in the evening without me Items denoted with (R) are reverse-scored.