Work-Family Conflict and Mental Health among Low-Income Earners: Gender Differences

Abstract

An increase of 0.3 million low-income households in Malaysia is found to encounter personal and work stressors. Work-family conflict is one of the work stressors that lead to mental health problems, particularly among low-income households. Prevention of low-income earners' mental health problems stemming from inter-role conflicts is a great challenge for public health. Thus, the research aims to assess the level of work-family conflict dimensions, including time-based war, strain-based conflict, and behavior-based conflict, and the level of three mental health dimensions of stress, anxiety and depression. Also, this study aims to examine the gender differences in work-family competition and mental health among low-income earners. A total of 265 low-income earners from eight Local Authorities in Johor, Malaysia participated as the respondents of this study. The Work-family Conflict Scale (WFCS) and Depression, Anxiety and Stress Scale (DASS-21) were adapted in collecting the data. These two instruments have satisfactory reliability. The result of the study found that behavior-based conflict was the most prevalent of work-family conflict dimensions compared to strain-based war and time-based conflict. Meanwhile, most low-income earners experienced higher stress levels when assessing mental health status. Besides, analysis using the independent t-test demonstrated that no gender differences existed in both work-family conflict and mental health. The findings indicate that equal treatment of tackling inter-role conflict for both genders is required to help the low-income earners to reduce their mental health issues.