Does Community Resource Fit Matter to Fathers?

Abstract

Several scholars have noted that community resources might facilitate or hinder employees' ability to meet their many work and family demands, thereby affecting their psychological well-being. However, this is the first study to estimate these relationships using a newly developed quantitative measure of community resource fit that assesses the satisfaction of employed parents of school-aged children with key community resources. In this analysis, the authors focus on the relationships linking one aspect of community resource fit—specifically, child's school and school activity schedules, or school resource fit—as a contextual variable influencing well-being (i.e., job-role quality, psychological distress) in a sample of 53 employed married fathers. Among these fathers, having school and school activity schedules that meet their needs is associated with low psychological distress and high job-role quality. Importantly, fathers with fewer resources in terms of income or job flexibility benefit most in terms of their job-role quality.