Abstract
The Career-Family Attitudes scale (CFA) is a multidimensional psychometric instrument developed by organizational behavior scholars Martha M. Sanders, Mark L. Lengnick-Hall, Cynthia A. Lengnick-Hall, and Lori Steele-Clapp (1998). Designed to assess the prospective and concurrent expectations that individuals hold regarding the coordination of vocational pursuits and domestic life, the instrument captures both self-directed expectations and mutual spousal role expectations. The CFA contains 50 items evaluated along a 7-point Likert-type scale ranging from 1 (Strongly Disagree) to 7 (Strongly Agree). It assesses six underlying dimensions: Family Focus (subdivided into "I Defer" and "Someone Defers"), Balance, Career Focus, Dominance, Spousal Support, and Independence. The scale was intentionally constructed to maintain gender neutrality in its item syntax, permitting equitable administration across diverse demographic cohorts, dual-earner couples, and labor force entrants. Psychometric evaluations demonstrate sound internal consistency reliability, with subscale Cronbach's alpha coefficients ranging between .67 and .84. Construct and criterion-related validity have been verified through systematic correlations with educational aspirations, academic performance (grade point average), gender, and geographical setting (urban versus rural origin). The CFA remains a foundational measurement tool in work-family interface research, vocational psychology, and couples counseling, providing vital diagnostic insight into anticipatory work-family conflict and negotiated marital division of labor.
Keywords
Career-Family Attitudes scale, Work-Family Interface, Dual-Career Couples, Work-Life Balance, Role Expectations, Career Salience, Anticipatory Socialization, Marital Roles, Division of Household Labor, Gender Roles
Authors
The Career-Family Attitudes scale was conceptualized and psychometrically validated by a collaborative team of management and organizational psychology researchers:
- Martha M. Sanders, Ph.D.: Department of Management, College of Business Administration, University of Akron. Her scholarship focuses on organizational behavior, vocational decision-making, and the dynamics of career entry among emerging professionals.
- Mark L. Lengnick-Hall, Ph.D.: Professor of Management, Department of Management, University of Texas at San Antonio. An internationally recognized scholar in strategic human resource management, organizational capability building, and workforce integration.
- Cynthia A. Lengnick-Hall, Ph.D.: Professor of Management, Department of Management, University of Texas at San Antonio. Her research encompasses strategic human resources, work-life management systems, and organizational resilience.
- Lori Steele-Clapp, M.S.: Researcher affiliated with management and labor relations research initiatives, specializing in survey design, human resource analytics, and early-career socialization processes.
Purpose
The primary purpose of the Career-Family Attitudes scale is to quantify individual cognitive expectations, structural beliefs, and relational assumptions regarding how career demands and domestic responsibilities intersect within an adult partnership. Historically, work-family assessment tools focused retrospectively or contemporaneously on established, mid-career employees who were already immersed in acute work-family conflict. Sanders, Lengnick-Hall, Lengnick-Hall, and Steele-Clapp recognized a critical empirical void: the lack of validated instruments designed to capture anticipatory career-family role attitudes among individuals preparing to enter or newly navigating the professional labor force.
The CFA addresses both self-referent expectations (what the respondent plans to sacrifice, manage, or prioritize) and partner-referent expectations (what the respondent anticipates or demands that a spouse will prioritize). In modern labor economics and sociological structures, the traditional breadwinner-homemaker model has been substantially displaced by dual-earner and dual-career couples. However, cognitive schemas regarding who bears primary responsibility for domestic labor, whose occupational advancement takes precedence, and how inter-role conflicts are resolved often remain unarticulated, leading to acute strain, marital dissatisfaction, and career compromise.
In applied research contexts, the CFA enables organizational scientists, sociologists, and vocational psychologists to examine how early socialization, gender identity, educational attainment, and geographic background shape work-family strategy profiles. Clinically and diagnostically, the scale serves as a valuable psychoeducational and premarital inventory. By identifying misalignments in role expectations between prospective partners—such as divergent beliefs concerning household decision-making, child-care outsourcing, or geographic relocation for career promotion—the CFA helps mitigate emergent role overload and gendered work-family strain.
Psychological Construct
The Career-Family Attitudes scale operationalizes the multi-faceted cognitive schema individuals construct regarding the coordination of work and home domains. Rather than conceptualizing work-family management as a single unidimensional continuum ranging from career-dominant to family-dominant, the CFA captures a six-dimensional architecture:
1. Family Focus
The Family Focus construct assesses the extent to which occupational advancement is subordinated to familial, marital, and parental demands. Through empirical refinement, Sanders et al. established that this dimension comprises two discrete sub-facets:
- "I Defer" Subscale: Measures personal willingness to sacrifice one's own professional advancement for domestic maintenance. High scores reflect personal readiness to forgo career aspirations, defer financial leadership, yield in marital disagreements, and assume sole responsibility for childcare and domestic labor.
- "Someone Defers" Subscale: Captures structural and normative beliefs that family well-being fundamentally requires one partner to forgo full-time occupational pursuits. This dimension rejects the viability of simultaneous dual-career marriages and reflects skepticism toward professional external childcare (e.g., day care providers).
2. Balance
The Balance dimension reflects an egalitarian cognitive model characterized by mutual accommodation, reciprocal support, and equitable division of both professional and household responsibilities. Individuals scoring high on Balance reject traditional gendered divisions of labor, expecting financial decisions to be made collaboratively, child-rearing and housework to be shared symmetrically, and both partners' occupational trajectories to be valued with equivalent weight.
3. Career Focus
The Career Focus dimension gauges an individual's endorsement of occupational salience over domestic and marital claims. This construct operationalizes the psychological preparedness to prioritize professional emergencies, job demands, and career-related commitments above marital interaction and family obligations, acknowledging that career success frequently requires domestic boundary permeability.
4. Dominance
The Dominance construct reflects hierarchical power dynamics and traditional patriarchal or asymmetric role structures within the home. It assesses expectations that the respondent holds superior decision-making authority regarding household finances, maintains a primary career trajectory, and anticipates that their partner will defer personal educational advancement or employment to maintain the home and raise children.
5. Spousal Support
The Spousal Support dimension operationalizes the expectation that one's partner will actively facilitate the respondent's career progression by absorbing domestic burdens, yielding during disagreements, conceding to geographic relocation for career advancement, and insulating the respondent from household stress and disruptions during non-work hours.
6. Independence
The Independence construct measures autonomy and individuation within the marital partnership. It evaluates attitudes concerning personal agency, including expectations that each partner may pursue autonomous leisure activities, evening social engagements, and solitary vacations without requiring reciprocal spousal inclusion.
Theoretical Framework
The conceptual architecture of the Career-Family Attitudes scale is grounded in three major psychological and sociological paradigms: Role Theory, Gender Role Socialization, and the Anticipatory Socialization model of vocational development.
Role Theory and the Scarcity Hypothesis
Rooted in the seminal formulations of Role Theory by Kahn, Wolfe, Quinn, Snoek, and Rosenthal (1964), the CFA presumes that individuals occupy multiple social roles—most prominently, employee, spouse, and parent. Traditional role theory posits the Scarcity Hypothesis (Goode, 1960), which asserts that human energy and time are finite physiological and psychological resources. Consequently, simultaneous participation in demanding vocational and domestic roles inherently generates inter-role conflict, where conformity to the demands of one role makes conformity to the other substantially more difficult. The CFA quantifies how individuals cognitively resolve this expected scarcity—either by demanding spousal deference, accepting personal career compromise, or seeking egalitarian structural balance.
Social Role Theory and Gender Socialization
The instrument incorporates insights from Alice Eagly's (1987) Social Role Theory. Historically, societal gender socialization channels men toward the instrumental breadwinner role and women toward expressive, nurturing domestic roles. Sanders et al. formulated the CFA to evaluate whether modern labor force entrants replicate traditional gendered cognitive schemas (e.g., high Dominance and Spousal Support among men, high "I Defer" among women) or whether emerging cohorts display converging, egalitarian attitudes. By formulating all items with gender-neutral syntax, the instrument avoids framing traditional divisions as normative, permitting unbiased structural measurement across both sexes.
Anticipatory Socialization and Cognitive Schemas
Drawing on Robert K. Merton's (1957) concept of anticipatory socialization, the scale operationalizes the cognitive models that young adults construct before confronting actual marital and career demands. Before entering dual-career partnerships, individuals develop implicit relational contracts regarding equity, dominance, and spousal support. The CFA captures these latent mental models, providing a validated metric for assessing how pre-career socialization predicts future marital negotiations, career sacrifices, and work-life adaptation.
Validity
Extensive psychometric investigations conducted by Sanders et al. (1998) established robust evidence for the construct, convergent, discriminant, and criterion-related validity of the Career-Family Attitudes scale across diverse samples of individuals entering the labor force.
Construct and Factorial Validity
The structural validity of the CFA was established using exploratory factor analysis with oblique and orthogonal rotational procedures. The initial pool of items resolved cleanly into six primary conceptual dimensions accounting for substantial total variance. Within the Family Focus domain, empirical item clustering demonstrated a meaningful bifurcation between self-deferral ("I Defer") and generalized ideological beliefs about family functioning ("Someone Defers"), confirming that personal willingness to compromise is cognitively distinct from abstract traditionalism.
Criterion-Related and Nomological Validity
Criterion and construct validity were substantiated through systematic bivariate correlations with theoretically linked demographic and educational criteria:
- Educational Aspirations: Career Focus was positively and significantly correlated with respondents' educational aspirations (r > 0, p < .01) and cumulative Grade Point Average (GPA). In contrast, Family Focus correlated negatively with educational aspirations and GPA, confirming that individuals pursuing intensive educational pathways anticipate higher occupational salience.
- Gender Covariation: In alignment with social role predictions, male respondents demonstrated significantly higher scores on the Dominance and Spousal Support dimensions, whereas female respondents scored significantly higher on the Balance dimension. Furthermore, male gender correlated negatively with Independence expectations.
- Geographic and Cultural Socialization: Higher Dominance scores were significantly and positively associated with rural upbringing, consistent with sociological literature documenting greater prevalence of traditional patriarchal role division in rural communities relative to metropolitan environments.
- Balance Correlations: The Balance subscale exhibited significant positive correlations with both academic achievement (GPA) and high educational aspirations, while correlating negatively with male gender, demonstrating that egalitarian dual-career management is strongly endorsed by highly educated women.
Reliability
The internal consistency of the Career-Family Attitudes scale subscales was evaluated using Cronbach's coefficient alpha in the initial validation sample of prospective labor force entrants (Sanders et al., 1998). The reported reliability statistics demonstrate acceptable to high psychometric precision across the subscales:
- Family Focus Subscale: α = .78
- Balance Subscale: α = .78
- Career Focus Subscale: α = .84
- Dominance Subscale: α = .75
- Spousal Support Subscale: α = .67
- Independence Subscale: Acceptable internal consistency demonstrated across primary factor loadings.
The Career Focus (α = .84), Balance (α = .78), and Family Focus (α = .78) subscales exceed standard psychometric thresholds (α ≥ .75) for basic and applied psychological research. The Spousal Support subscale demonstrated moderate reliability (α = .67), reflecting the multidimensional nature of spousal support expectations, which combine emotional insulation, household labor concession, and geographic relocation readiness.
Factor Analysis
The structural dimensionality of the 50-item Career-Family Attitudes scale was established by Sanders et al. (1998) through exploratory factor analysis (EFA). Principal components analysis followed by Varimax and oblique rotations was utilized to examine the latent factor architecture among the survey items.
The factor extraction process adhered to standard psychometric criteria, including the Kaiser-Guttman rule (eigenvalues greater than 1.0), inspection of the scree plot, and item communality evaluations. The primary factor solution confirmed six distinct, theoretically coherent factors:
- Family Focus: Items reflecting the prioritization of family over career, which subsequent analytical refinement segmented into "I Defer" (personal sacrifice) and "Someone Defers" (ideological opposition to dual full-time careers).
- Balance: Items loading highly on joint financial decision-making, shared childcare, shared household tasks, and symmetrical career prioritization.
- Career Focus: Items reflecting expected prioritization of work emergencies, career obligations, and job demands ahead of domestic relationships.
- Dominance: High loadings on items specifying unilateral financial control, educational superiority, and expectation of spousal home confinement.
- Spousal Support: Items reflecting expectations that a spouse will yield in arguments, assume sole housework if unemployed, and relocate geographically to accommodate the respondent's career advancement.
- Independence: Items loading cleanly on independent recreation, separate vacations, and solo evening socializing outside the marital dyad.
Items loading lower than .35 or demonstrating severe cross-loadings across multiple unrelated factors were scrutinized, yielding a final stable 50-item battery capturing the multidimensional space of prospective career-family accommodation.
Instrument / Measurement Tool
- Instrument Name: Career-Family Attitudes scale (CFA)
- Authors: Martha M. Sanders, Mark L. Lengnick-Hall, Cynthia A. Lengnick-Hall, and Lori Steele-Clapp (1998)
- Construct Measured: Prospective and concurrent attitudes, expectations, and role allocations regarding the career-family interface
- Total Item Count: 50 items
- Response Format: 7-point Likert-type scale ranging from 1 = Strongly Disagree to 7 = Strongly Agree
- Administration Mode: Self-administered paper-and-pencil or digital survey
- Administration Time: Approximately 15 to 20 minutes
- Subscale Architecture:
- Family Focus ("I Defer"): Items 1–10 (Item 1 reverse-scored)
- Family Focus ("Someone Defers"): Items 11–14 (Item 11 reverse-scored)
- Balance: Items 15–24 (Item 15 reverse-scored)
- Career Focus: Items 25–30 (Items 27, 30 reverse-scored)
- Dominance: Items 31–39 (Items 32, 36 reverse-scored)
- Spousal Support: Items 40–46
- Independence: Items 47–50
- Scoring Procedures: Items marked with (R) are reverse-scored prior to summation: 1 becomes 7, 2 becomes 6, 3 becomes 5, 4 remains 4, 5 becomes 3, 6 becomes 2, and 7 becomes 1. Subscale scores are computed by summing or averaging the respective item ratings within each subscale. Higher scores indicate greater endorsement of the underlying construct.
Permissions & Fee and Test Year
The Career-Family Attitudes scale was published in 1998 in the Journal of Organizational Behavior (Vol. 19, Iss. 6, pp. 603–619). The instrument and its primary item inventory were reproduced from Appendix A of the original publication, copyrighted © 1998 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
The scale items are accessible in the public academic domain for non-commercial educational, scientific, and dissertation research purposes, provided that proper scholarly attribution is accorded to Sanders et al. (1998). Commercial reproduction, incorporation into commercial digital diagnostic platforms, or distribution for profit requires formal copyright permission and licensing through the publisher, John Wiley & Sons Limited.
References
- Eagly, A. H. (1987). Sex differences in social behavior: A social-role interpretation. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
- Goode, W. J. (1960). A theory of role strain. American Sociological Review, 25(4), 483–496. https://doi.org/10.2307/2092933
- Greenhaus, J. H., & Beutell, N. J. (1985). Sources of conflict between work and family roles. Academy of Management Review, 10(1), 76–88. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.1985.4277352
- Kahn, R. L., Wolfe, D. M., Quinn, R. P., Snoek, J. D., & Rosenthal, R. A. (1964). Organizational stress: Studies in role conflict and ambiguity. John Wiley & Sons.
- Merton, R. K. (1957). Social theory and social structure. Free Press.
- Sanders, M. M., Lengnick-Hall, M. L., Lengnick-Hall, C. A., & Steele-Clapp, L. (1998). Love and work: Career-family attitudes of new entrants into the labor force. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 19(6), 603–619.