Work-family balance among dual-career parents: defining the desirable

The meaning of work-family balance was explored with twenty parents from dual-career families using semi-structured interviews. The findings suggest that, for such individuals, work-family balance may be defined as a state in which a range of needs are met by allocating time to both work and family roles according to a combination of individual priorities and the demands of work and family. However, these individual priorities are affected by gender. The absence of work-family conflict appears to be a common, but not an essential, characteristic of work-family balance. Thus work-family balance can be viewed as a matrix that comprises a work-family conflict/no conflict continuum and a work-family balance/imbalance continuum.