An investigation into the inter-relationship among work, family and part-time education in Hong Kong

Abstract

Part-time tertiary education at both undergraduate and graduate levels are becoming more and more popular. In pursuing part-time studies, students must use their own limited and valuable non-work hours at the cost of giving up other commitments to their family and social lives. Part-time study is considered to be a very effective indicator of employees' drive for personal development. A research was conducted in October 2000 to study the mechanism linking work, family and part-time tertiary education, with a review to clarifying the issue and recommending means to manage the conflict among roles in these three domains. About 500 postgraduate and undergraduate part-time university students (who had full-time jobs) in Hong Kong were surveyed. The results of the study suggest that the support of employers and families has a certain statistically significant relationship with the perceived job performance and satisfaction in family and work lives of employees pursuing part-time tertiary education. However, it was observed that academic performance of employees' part-time study actually had no statistically significant correlation with any of the independent and mediating variables that were analysed in the study.