Descriptive Evidence of the Work-Family Compensation among Japanese Midwives: Using the Multiple Role Map Program

Abstract

Working midwives actively perform various roles including midwife, manager, mother, marital partner and friend. From the “compensation” perspective, they try to cope with dissatisfaction caused in one role (e.g. midwife role) by obtaining satisfaction in other roles (e.g. mother role). Although the episodes about compensation were useful information for the practical career support, the previous studies didn’t show enough evidence. Hence, this study aimed to collect compensation episodes from Japanese working midwives and to show the descriptive evidence by using Multiple Role Map (MRM) program. The participants were female midwives working in a university hospital in Japan. We conducted the MRM program to all of the midwives working in the hospital and collected eighteen MRM sheets from them (recovery rate = 100%). According to the spreadsheet and descriptive episodes, major contents of compensable dissatisfactions were fatigue, frustration, pressure, distress and job stressors caused in the midwife and manager roles. Meanwhile, these dissatisfactions were compensated by satisfactions received in the friend, marital partner and mother roles and the private time. To obtain more practical findings for the career support, we will develop a statistical scoring method with the MRM data and conduct a validation study comparing the scores and external criterion for standardized health outcomes.