Job control and demands, work-life balance and wellbeing among selfemployed men and women in Europe

European policymakers encourage individuals to become self-employed because it is a way to promote innovation and job creation. It can be assumed that health and well-being among the self-employed and managers in small-scale enterprises are particularly crucial in this enterprise group because the smallness of the enterprise makes its members vulnerable. Earlier studies have indicated that the self-employed have a high working pace and work for long and irregular hours, indicating that it can be difficult to stay at home because of sickness. The purpose of this study is to investigate the occurrence of sickness presenteeism among the self-employed in relation to the organizationally employed and to analyze whether any differences can be explained by higher work demands among the self-employed. The study is based on the fifth European survey on working conditions (2010) and includes the northwestern European countries in the survey. The questions cover a wide range of topics designed to meet the European Union's political needs. The main variables in this study are sickness presenteeism and several indicators of time demands. The results show that the self-employed report a higher level of sickness presenteeism than the employed: 52.4 versus 43.6%. All indicators of time demands are significantly related to the risk for sickness presenteeism, also when controlling for background characteristics. The results confirm that the level of sickness presenteeism is higher among the self-employed and that high time demands are a major explanation to this.

The family and the work place are two arenas of central importance for most adult people. Consequently, one can assume that the level of satisfaction with one’s family life and job may be critical to one’s level of happiness in general. However, there are reasons to believe that there are variations according to gender and gender regime. The general aim of this study is to analyse the relative importance of job satisfaction and satisfaction with family life for happiness among women and men in different gender regimes. Analyses are based on comparative data from the International Social Survey Program 2012. Results show that the level of satisfaction with family life appears more important to the general level of happiness than the level of job satisfaction. This is true for both women and men and in different gender regimes. However, the level of satisfaction with family life appears less important to men’s level of happiness in countries representing a conservative gender regime. Another interesting related result is that the level of happiness appears generally lower among women living in a conservative gender regime.

Studies have indicated the importance of family life and psychosocial working conditions for mental wellbeing. More recently, studies have highlighted that a good balance between work and family is crucial for good mental wellbeing. However, few studies compare the relative importance of these factors for mental wellbeing. The main aim of this study was to analyse the relative importance of psychosocial working conditions, family conditions and work/family conflict for mental wellbeing. The analyses are based on a Swedish data set, including questions regarding working life, family life and mental wellbeing. A total of 12,461 married/cohabiting individuals employed in Swedish organisations were included in the study. Results show that psychosocial working conditions, family conditions and work/family conflict all were related to mental wellbeing. In the final regression model, the strongest correlation was found between mental wellbeing and the variables work/family conflict, satisfaction with private life and partner relationship, with work/family conflict appearing to be of greatest importance. These findings highlight the necessity of including measurements of work/family conflict when studying the importance of work and family conditions for individual mental wellbeing. For workplace health promotion and improvement, it may be beneficial to consider not only psychosocial working conditions, but also family conditions, and particularly work/life conflict.

Most studies show that parents have a lower level of wellbeing than non-parents. An interesting question is if this is true in different contexts, such for instance different family policy contexts. Although there are common family policy goals for all member states of the European Union there are still major differences between states regarding the implementation and contents of various family policy measures. The aim of the article is to study the importance of family policy context and gender for the negative influence of having children on mental wellbeing. Data is derived from an extensive cross-country data set named European Social Survey Program (ESS). Family policy context is measured through the different family policies contexts that each state represents, resulting in a Nordic cluster (representing an extensive family policy context) and two clusters, the conservative and liberal, representing less extensive family policy contexts. Results in general show that the level of mental wellbeing is lower among people with children living at home than among people with no children at home. However, separate analyses of the family policy contexts indicate that this difference between those with and without children only exists in the conservative and liberal family policy contexts. Further, separate analyses of women and men in different family policy contexts show that the negative association between the occurrence of children and mental wellbeing exist only among women in conservative and liberal contexts. This indicates that the family policy context is of importance for mother’s mental wellbeing but not for father’s.