Chapter 4 - The vital and stabilising role of work preferences
105
stable components of attitudes and preferences, by including objective parental
socializing factors that may have influenced mother’s attitudes and preference a
priori of her entering the labour market.
The main research question is:
To what extent do heterogeneous general gender values and personal gender
and work attitudes of Dutch mothers explain their number of preferred work
hours, and in turn, to what extent can their preferred number of work hours
explain their labour market behaviour?
I try to answer this question with a path analysis using data from a
survey among
a representative sample of Dutch mothers. For this study, a special questionnaire
was completed in November 2010 by 935 mothers with at least one child below
the age of 13 still living at home.
The main limitation of the study is that it is based on a cross sectional survey,
meaning that behaviour and intentions (preferences and attitudes) are measured at
the same moment. The path model that I test is based on the assumption that
socializing factors influence attitudes and preferences,
and thus preferences have
some origins a priori of behaviour, which might act as a stabilising factor on work
preferences. In the study it is acknowledged that there is also an opposite causal
effect running from behaviours towards preferences and attitudes. The factual
causality can only be determined with longitudinal data, which is, unfortunately,
not available.
In the next sections I discuss three hypotheses based on a concise overview of
the literature on the key concepts of this study: work preferences (preferred
number of work hours),
work and gender attitudes, and parental socialization.
4.2
Preferred number of work hours: cause or effect?
The first part of this section addresses the question of the extent to which work
preferences influence labour market behaviour. Labour market behaviour of
mothers can be split into the decision to work or stay at home, and subsequently
the number of hours that mothers work. Work preferences are here defined as the
number of hours mothers prefer to work, and not as mothers’ occupational
choices. The main focus is to understand the variation on women’s labour
participation, since this variation is particularly large in the Netherlands, and not
their diverse choices of occupation.
The expected relationship between work preferences
and labour market
behaviour is based on the theory of planned behaviour of Ajzen (1991) and Ajzen
and Fishbein (1973, 2005). This theory assumes that in a given situation, a person
holds or forms a specific intention towards his behaviour, which influences his
successive overt behaviour (Ajzen and Fishbein 1973, p.42; Ajzen, 1991, p.182).
In other words, intention is an aim that guides action to perform a single
Socialized Choices - Labour Market Behaviour of Dutch Mothers
106
behaviour. At the base lies the assumption that the stronger the intention for a
certain behaviour, the more likely it is that a person will perform that behaviour.
The overt behaviour in this study is labour market participation and the number of
hours that a Dutch mother actually works. There
is thus a high compatibility
between the goal of the preferred behaviour and the action itself, viz. the number
of work hours, and therefore a high correspondence between the preference and
the behaviour can be expected. (Ajzen and Fishbein, 2005, p.183).
Many empirical psychological studies have demonstrated the predictive
validity of behavioural intentions, for example in drugs or condom use, prisoners’
dilemmas, migration or in political voting (Sheeran, 2002). Sheeran (2002)
reported in his meta-analysis of intent-behavioural studies, an overall correlation
of .53 between intention and behaviour (also Irvine and Evans, 1995; Swanborn,
1996, p.37). In relation to labour market behaviour empirical studies on the
relationship between intention and action/behaviour are scarce, although there are
some studies on intentions of migration and entrepreneurship (Carr and Sequeira
2007; Kreuger,
Reilly and Carsrud, 2000). Kreuger et al. (2000) for example
showed in their empirical study among 97 North-American senior business
students that intentions contribute to explaining why many entrepreneurs decide
to start a business long before they learn about the opportunities.
There is a long-running scientific discourse about the causality: do intentions
cause behaviour or do they rather reflect the evaluation of current or past
behaviour (French et al., 2005; Plotnikoff, Lubans, Trih and Craig, 2012;
Swanborn, 1996). According to Ajzen and Fishbein (2005), there is exceeding
evidence, based especially on longitudinal studies, that shows that intentions have
an important causal impact on behaviour (Ajzen and Fishbein, 2005, p.198).
Nonetheless, Ajzen and Fishbein acknowledge that
the relationship between
intention and behaviour is reciprocal. Performing a particular behaviour can yield
new insights in the consequences of that behaviour, the expectations of others,
and the issue of control. This feedback in itself is likely to influence future
intentions and behaviour (Ajzen and Fishbein, 2005, p.195). Nonetheless, Azjen
and Fishbein argue that this insight still begs the question why people behaved
previously in that particular way (Ajzen and Fishbein, 2005, p.201-202).
Moreover, why is a particular situation perceived as an insurmountable stumbling
block by one person and may present a stepping stone to someone else (Hakim,
2000, p.170).
Put differently, why do women perceive similar situations
differently?
Most sociological studies of people’s preferred number of work hours focus
on the mismatch between preferred and actual work hours, and the negative
consequences of these mismatches such as harmful effects on people’s lives and
under-utilisation or over-employment of the labour force (Constant and
Otterbach, 2011, p.1; Holmes et al., 2012; Reynolds, 2003). The upshot of these
studies is that mismatches are caused by institutional and labour market
constraints (e.g. lack of appropriate childcare, insufficient availability
of suitable
jobs), job characteristics (e.g. rigid standard working weeks, non-supportive