RESEARCH OVERVIEW
The FFCR project is committed to identifying some of the key neighbourhood resources across Canada’s community regions that might enhance parents’ ability to cope with competing demands of work and family.
OBJECTIVES
COLLECT DATA
We're collecting data about the locations and availability of community resources (childcare, health care, transportation, recreation, and schools) across Canadian neighbourhoods.
GAUGE BENEFITS
We are working to understand how the community resources available to working parents help them to balance competing work and family demands, as well as benefit their mental health and well-being.
RAISE AWARENESS
We want to make our findings accessible and bring attention to the importance of community resources for parent's day-to-day lives and overall mental health. We hope to identify where more community resources are needed to help address these gaps.
RESEARCH APPROACH
Collecting and centralizing data
Our research team seeks out and extracts data related to Family Friendly Community Resources (FFCR), based on census divisions.
Much of this information is publicly available, but inaccessible through one central repository. Instead, these data are scattered across municipal or provincial-based websites/databases, making it difficult for researchers to include in their analyses.
We begun by collecting FFCR data for the first two years of the CAN-WSH study (2011 and 2013).
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Testing preliminary measures of FFCR
In the early stages of data extraction, we conducted reliability tests to ensure that all team members were using similar definitions of what constitutes FFCR.
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Broadly, FFCRs include: childcare services (public and private); family supportive social groups; family-friendly centres; and, features of the built environment (walkability; green spaces; available amenities).
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Identifying and documenting patterns of FFCRs across Canadian regions over time
We are mapping FFCRs to geographical regions, and evaluating each region based on their overall family-friendly features.
Matching community-level data to existing individual-level longitudinal data
Our team matches the community-level data to existing individual-level longitudinal data by census division and year from the Canadian Work Stress and Health Study.
Since 2011—and throughout the past ten years—we’ve repeatedly surveyed thousands of Canadians like yourself to understand their work, family, stress, and health experiences—over time. For many years now, people have been participating in a landmark study. We’ve surveyed all different kinds of workers. Bakers. Pharmacists. Transportation planners. Childcare providers. Software developers. Teachers. Clothing importers. Truck drivers. Nurses. Cleaners. Café owners. Miners. Retail managers. Lab technicians. And so many more…
The FFCR project connects these data from individuals to community based information to answer the our main research questions — see below for what we've uncovered so far.
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RESEARCH QUESTIONS
Based on our preliminarily collected data on FFCR, we are in the process of conducting multilevel lagged dependent analyses in SAS (a popular statistical program) to answer several research questions (RQ’s):
Do community resources influence experiences of Work Family Conflict (WFC)?
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What types of community resources matter most for levels of WFC?
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How does the introduction or retraction of resources in a community over time influence levels of WFC?
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When residents move to areas with more or less resources than their previous neighbourhood, do we see changes in WFC?
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Do these associations vary by gender and parental/marital statuses?
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