Role Configuration and Identity Structure: an Exploration of Exchanges Across Roles.

Abstract

This study explores the meanings and consequences of having the roles of parent and /or spouse in addition to the role of professional. Most previous research on professionals with other roles has focussed on the individual roles, or the conflicts between them. However, it has become increasingly apparent, especially for professional women, that there are positive as well as negative relationships between roles. This dissertation first develops a theoretical model of the identity structure underlying a person's involvement in a set of roles. The model seeks to explain varying levels of involvement in a role in terms of its ability to express what is central to the person (the core identity) and to meet the dem and s and expectations of the social environment. We assert that a person with several roles may make tradeoffs between the opportunities and constraints inherent in those roles. It follows that people with few roles should be more dependant on each of those roles to achieve happiness than people with more complex sets of roles. This hypothesis, and related propositions, are subjected to an initial test by comparing the attitudes and role content of a sample of 77 professionals (faculty), grouped according to the configuration of their major sets of roles: professional only, professional-parent, professional-spouse, or professional-parent-spouse. From responses to a lengthy questionnaire, we compared individual and role characteristics, happiness, and satisfaction with role performance, for people across these role configurations. We found that role configuration was more closely associated with overall happiness than any single role characteristic, and that the most complex role configuration contained the largest percentage of happy respondents. The highest level of satisfaction in a role was found among those who had the professional role alone. There were important differences between male and female professionals in role characteristics and especially in the relationships between satisfaction in one role and satisfaction in other roles. From a detailed exploration of the questionnaire data, it is possible to specify the minimum requirements for a more comprehensive validation of the notion of role configuration. These are expressed as a set of dimensions for quota sampling and a detailed set of data requirements to be met with in-depth interview techniques.