Work-family Balance (WFB). Contributions from the analysis of three professions with high pressure to perform

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Sara Melo1, Catarina Egreja2

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1Instituto de Sociologia da Universidade do Porto, Portugal; 2GESA / CiiEM, Instituto Universitário Egas Moniz, Portugal

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The reconciliation of private life and professional life is a topic widely studied by the Social Sciences. In Sociology, in particular, we have witnessed a debate that has been shifting from the negative impact of work on private life (Schaufeli and Bakker, 2004) and of private life on work (Frone, 1992) to less deleterious approaches focused on the positive bidirectional effects between work and family life (Greenhaus and Powell, 2006; Voydanoff, 2004), in terms of well-being, individual enrichment and even construction of an identity performance (Walker and Caprar, 2019).

In this regard, we propose to bring new data by focusing on the results of a study – ConPerLit Project, financed by Foundation for Science and Technology (PTDC/SOC/30734/2017), still in progress, carried out in Portugal, among three professional groups chosen for the enormous pressure to which they are, daily, subjected - nurses, police officers and journalists. Through a mixed-methods approach, and based on 42 interviews and 523 questionnaires, the data elucidate how some characteristics of the work (namely the working hours and the pace of work) have an impact on sleep, diet and time for family/private life. In addition, we will also have the opportunity to verify how these individuals evaluate the conciliation of these two spheres (in a bidirectional way), showing the totalizing nature of work.