Effect Direction Between Work-Family Conflict and Psychological Strain: A Replication and Extension

Research on the relationship between work-family conflict (WFC) and psychological strain provides largely inconsistent results about the direction of this effect. To identify a source of this variation, we review modeling approaches used in 15 studies derived from the only meta analytical test of the direction of this effect (Nohe et al., 2015), and 51 newer studies not yet included in this test. We find that none of these studies accounts for the confounding effect of unmeasured, trait-like between-person differences, for example, by adding random intercepts (RIs) to the structural model. Instead, they apply approaches that combine the within-person variance and the between-person variance (e.g., Crossed-Lagged Panel Model, CLPM), thereby leading to biased effect estimates. Recent methodological reviews have thus urged scholars to apply the RI-CLPM to solve this problem. Following these calls, our study replicates and extends prior research by modeling the effect of interest using the CLPM and the RI-CLPM. We seek to examine whether Nohe et al.’s (2015) result holds once the RI-CLPM is applied. We collected three-wave survey data from 12’241 working adults living in Germany. The data are representative of the German workforce and were collected annually from 2016 until 2018. The RI-CLPM yields a significantly better model fit than the CLPM. Whereas the results from our CLPM replicate the meta-analytical finding (i.e., WFC and psychological strain affect each other reciprocally), the RI-CLPM yields a different result: WFC leads to greater psychological strain and not vice versa. Implications for theory development and practice are discussed.