UNH Cooperative Extension researchers and staff along with partners from the UNH Survey Center, the Carsey Institute, the Center for Rural Partnerships at Plymouth State and the NH Department of Employment Securities will soon be surveying nearly 7,000 New Hampshire residents to better understand how New Hampshire citizen’s jobs interact with their family life.

The survey, the first of its kind in New Hampshire, is designed to provide researchers with a clearer picture of how working in the current New Hampshire economy is affecting family life.

"We know that a worker who is worried about his or her family’s needs is a less productive worker. We also know that stress and strain at work can affect the well being of someone’s family life," said Project Director and UNH Cooperative Extension Family Life and Policy Specialist Dr. Malcolm Smith, "What we are looking for here are clues to how employers, communities, and policy makers can work together to make New Hampshire an even better place to work and raise a family."

Smith is joined in this effort by Dr. Kristin Smith, a family demographer at UNH’s Carsey Institute, Dr. Ben Amsden, a researcher at Plymouth State University’s Center for Rural Partnerships, Martin Capodice, a project specialist with the NH Dept. of Employment Security, and Megan Henly, a graduate assistant in sociology. In addition, Dr. Andy Smith, UNH Survey Center director, will oversee the thousands of phone calls to New Hampshire working families.

The project’s leader believes the study’s results will provide some vital information that could help New Hampshire and the nation in assuring that families don’t become victims of the current economic crisis.

"What we have learned from the past," says Smith, "is that it is the resilience of the American worker that always brings us out of hard economic times. That resilience, though, is directly dependent on the strengths of that worker’s family to endure hard times." What Smith’s team hopes to find in the research are some clear paths for strengthening the capacity of New Hampshire families to endure the current crisis.

Results of this study will be released in the fall of 2009 at UNH Cooperative Extension’s second annual summit on work and family, conducted with the NH Legislative Task Force on Work and Family and will bring together legislators, state and community leaders, business leaders, labor leaders and researchers in a coordinated effort to improve the lives of New Hampshire’s working families.

Smith and Cooperative Extension Family and Consumer Resource educators will use the findings to develop programs designed to directly strengthen New Hampshire’s working families’ abilities to better juggle the demands of caring for family and working in a tough economy.