Suchergebnisse

Research on the dual-career family is identifying strains and costs particular to women who are attempting to balance the two roles of career and family. Counseling and associated research have not, as yet, provided knowledge that would lead to the more effective counseling of women in dual career families. Using wives in the second phase of a longitudinal study of 53 dual career couples, this study inductively derives a set of dual-career scales useful for counseling: family and career interface, personal satisfaction with trend setting, career support of the traditional wife-mother role, trend breaking, trend maintenance, and compensatory factors. All met stringent reliability analyses and S form Guttman scales that allow for the internal ordering of subareas from least difficult to most difficult. These subareas in the Guttman scales provide a quantitative base for identifying in detail areas to counsel and which areas must be counseled first before other diagnosed problem areas can be coped with.

THE topic of dual-career families has been approached by numerous researchers since the publication of Rapoport and Rapoport's (1969) pioneering work. Most have utilized a cross-sectional research design. This article attempts to add a longitudinal dimension by reporting data collected in 1977 from 45 professional women who were originally interviewed in 1969. Their career and family patterns are investigated in terms of the family life cycle proposed by Duvall (1971) and a fourfold typology introduced here. It appears that the professional careers of these women have been influenced to some extent by marriage, but to a considerable extent by the presence of children. Many of the respondents voiced the opinion that while combining a professional career, marriage, and motherhood is very appealing in ideal terms, in reality it may require a "superwoman" to do so in the face of current American cultural norms.