Work-family interactions among female teachers: Socio-demographic, labour and psychosocial predictors

The reciprocal interaction between work and family is an important issue currently, as demands in both contexts have increased in the present times. In educational system, the expansion of teaching duties that has occurred in recent years affects female teachers especially, as they have to balance the demands in both work and family contexts. This cross-sectional study aimed to assess demographic, labour and psychosocial predictors of work-family interactions within a random sample of 623 female teachers from a city in the metropolitan area of Porto Alegre, Brazil. The instruments used were a socio-demographic and labour questionnaire, the Psychosocial Risk Assessment Battery to assess work overload, self-efficacy, social support at work, autonomy, role conflict and interpersonal conflicts, and the Survey Work-Home Interaction-Nijmegen (SWING) to assess the work-family relationship interaction, considering its direction and quality in four dimensions - negative work-family interaction; negative family-work interaction; positive work-family interaction and positive family-work interaction. The results were obtained by means of linear regression analysis, indicating that the overload, weekly workload, performance of another occupational activity, social support and self-efficacy variables worked as predictors of the dimensions of the work-family interaction.