Abstract
When someone gets a divorce, we think of it as a family problem. When someone loses a job, we look to the work situation or the economy for an explanation. Stress occurs within roles, forming natural boundaries for our explanations. But roles are related, although not always in obvious fashion, suggesting in general that the occurrence of stress in one role will have implications for the meaning of stress in other roles. At the same time, Stressors may accumulate within a role. Divorce may follow from a history of increasing marital conflict or from positive counter-forces outside the domestic role (Levinger, 1976). Job loss can follow from the individual’s incapacity to perform or from larger economic mandates. How such events affect individuals must surely depend on the role history leading to the event. The primary purpose of this chapter is to examine the contextual role contingencies that affect the impact of two major events in work and family roles: divorce and unemployment.
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© 1990 Springer Science+Business Media New York
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Wheaton, B. (1990). Where Work and Family Meet. In: Eckenrode, J., Gore, S. (eds) Stress Between Work and Family. The Springer Series on Stress and Coping. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-2097-3_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-2097-3_8
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