Research on work life balance of married women

SYNOPSIS

Indian families are undergoing rapid changes due to the increased pace of urbanization. Indian women belonging to all classes have entered into paid occupations. At the present time, Indian women's exposure to educational opportunities is substantially higher than it was some decades ago, especially in the urban setting. This has opened new opportunities, increased awareness and raised aspirations of personal growth. This, along with economic pressure, has been instrumental in influencing women's decision to enter the work force. Most studies of employed married women in India have reported economic need as being the primary reason given for working.

With changing times and ever more job opportunities coming up for skilled persons, there is a drastic increase in expectations and piling up stress to meet those expectations. This topic is to find out how women in such a highly competitive, cutthroat scenario, have managed to balance their work and family without letting either fall apart. We will evaluate the respondents on age, number of children, job profile, working hours and their daily schedule. The broad topics of the research were: 1. Organization related issues 2. Parental Issues 3. Household paid and unpaid issues 4. Issues pertaining to managing the household 5. Personal aspirations and challenges 6. Coping and coping strategies

INTRODUCTION When a girl picks up a career she is very ambitious about her life. She wants to achieve many things. Even parents are extremely supportive nowadays and providing all facilities for their daughters to obtain education. After attaining a certain age, she decides to get married and this becomes the turning point in her life. Now she has to take the dual responsibility of her house as well as her job. Some of the ladies are lucky to get supportive in laws but some of them are not. They cannot by their right, claim any option to choose their career first, instead of maintaining their house. We want to find out exactly what kind of challenges a woman faces to succeed in her work as well as in keeping her family happy. SECONDARY DATA We went through a report by Niharika Doble and M. V. Supriya from Anna University. They had conducted a research on the topic - Gender Differences in the Perception of Work-Life Balance. Their analysis included the following:

Their conclusion is as follows: This survey brings out some of the issues related to work life balance in the Indian context. The study indicates that work life balance issues here are quite similar to those in the West. While in most countries in the developed world have put in place family friendly work practices (Moen and Yu 2000; Dougherty and West 2000), the same is yet to be seen in good measure in India. With the increase in number of dual career couples, it is but natural that such practices must be adopted here too, as they would go a long way towards improving productivity and enhancing quality of work and family life. Flex time, home working, child care facilities and the option to work part time are facilities that need to be introduced. Building a supportive work environment is yet another important initiative to be addressed. We want to keep this study as the basis of our research and find out if it applies to our target population. SAMPLE DESIGN Sampling technique used was Quota sampling which is a non-probability type of sampling. The reason for choosing this type of sampling was because our target group was married working women. This represents one of the types of demographics and hence to cover this target, quota sampling is the most preferred technique. Another reason for choosing this type of technique was that the time required for the research was limited and the sampling frame was not available. QUESTIONNAIRE DESIGN The questionnaire was designed on the basis of the following information: We first analysed what things we need to know from the respondent in order to meet the survey's objectives. We also considered secondary data for this. Then we defined

the target respondents as working and married women. After this the method of data collection was chosen which was through personal interview (questionnaire). We then decided on the question content on the basis of our purpose of research. While designing the questions, care was taken to use the appropriate wordings in order to get accurate responses from the respondents. The questions were designed to be clear, crisp and simple to understand, thus helping the respondent to give an appropriate answer. Depending upon the purpose and sensitivity of the question, the type of question was decided. Questions were put into proper format and order and the question flow was maintained so that one leads easily and naturally to the next. RESEARCH APPROACH AND RESEARCH DESIGN Qualitative method was used because the purpose of our research was to understand the work-life balance of married women (human behavior ) and the reasons that govern such behavior. Thus, we tried to describe a population without attempting to quantifiably measure variables or look to potential relationships between variables.