Author Description

Although research on the work-family interface has proliferated across multiple disciplines, two significant gaps remain. First, despite recognizing the bidirectional nature of work-family conflict, the antecedents of family-to-work conflict (FWC), compared to work-to-family conflict (WFC), are still far less understood. Second, an emerging body of work has documented the association between WFC and children's health. However, little is known about conditions that might moderate this focal association. Motivated by these empirical observations, my dissertation seeks to provide new knowledge about the consequences of family stressors-and their moderating contingencies in the work-family interface over time. In Chapter 2, I develop two competing hypotheses to assess the reciprocal relationship between financial strain, work-family conflict, and psychological distress. The results based on a three-wave cross-lagged model demonstrate that financial strain-a prominent chronic family stressor-at wave 1 is associated with FWC at wave 2. However, FWC at wave 2 and psychological distress at wave 3 are unrelated. Furthermore, WFC at wave 2 fully mediates the association between financial strain at wave 1 and psychological distress at wave 3. In line with this, I conduct fixed-effects models to establish the positive association between family stressors-as measured by financial strain, spousal disputes, and relationship dissatisfaction-and FWC over time in Chapter 3. Moreover, by integrating ideas of border theory with the stress process model, I propose that work-family multitasking can be conceptualized as a family-related stressor that might exacerbate the positive association between family stressors and FWC-and gender might further elaborate the narratives associated with the moderating effects of work-family multitasking.Chapter 4 shifts attention to the moderating contingencies of family stressors (i.e., financial strain, household income, spousal disputes, and relation