Research on Testing
Tech’s Students’ Perceptions of Parental Leave
Jin Hao
Dec.6th 2016
Abstract
The paper is aimed to test Texas Tech’s
students’ perceptions of parental leave. Firstly, a thorough literature review
including 15 news articles was made for us to obtain the basic perception of low
parental leave coverage in the United States now. Secondly, based on the
literature review, five hypotheses of different angles were made to compare
with students’ potential reactions. Then a questionnaire was made by ourselves,
allocated to students in Tech and combined together for analysis in the end. According
to the data of our survey, basic judgements on five hypotheses towards Tech
students’ perceptions was made, which were different to the author’s
predictions. The paper also discusses possible reasons for the difference and
proposes some revising advice for the questionnaire.
Keywords:
perceptions; parental leave
Introduction
In recent years, there has been much
debate over the parental leave in United States. As a group of students together
researching on the parental leave now, we are interested in the TTU students’
perceptions of parental leave in the United States. From the beginning, several
definitions of parental leave of different stages should be clarified to be the
basis of further discussion. To be specific, parental leave is an employee’s
welfare which consists of maternal leave, paternal leave and even adoptive
leave. Maternity leave is used to describe a particular period that a mother
could be absent from work to take care of her child for some reasons, for
example, breastfeeding or soothing. Similarly, paternal leave is used to define
the same particular period for a father. Though mothers are considered to put
more emphasis on the family issues conventionally, fathers are being influenced
by both the importance of men in family education and the equality of genders
these days. In this case, fathers have become more aware of the right they
should have on family issues and now many countries provide the right called
paternal leave for that reason.
However, in the United States, the
country with traditional low degree of motivation to interfere with economic
issues, there are few parents covered by parental leave currently. Even unpaid
parental leave is hard to find. From the other countries’ experience, we know
that men play as important a role as women on prompting parental leave. Thus, I
am also interested in the people’s perception of men’s attitude towards
parental leave in Texas Tech University and tried to make several hypotheses of
people’s perception based on the intense literature review and following survey
results later.
Literature
Review and Hypothesis
The United States is one of the developed countries which possesses a extremely
low coverage of parental leave and the only developed country which doesn’t
provide governmental mandated maternal leave, according to Wojcicki (2016). Due
to the highly competitive environment having lasted for a long time, it is
believed that real changes can only happen when federal governments make laws
to enforce states and companies to obey, according to both Wojcicki (2016) and
Starner (2016). According to the
literature review above, I think it is reasonable to make the following
hypothesis: most students would believe that the coverage of parental leave
becomes stagnant unless federal governments interfere with the parental leave issue.
For most employers unaccustomed to
parental leave, it would be harder for women with children to get employed by
them. Mr. Henderson (2016) mentioned that that the economic pressure of
parental leave would be borne both by people who take advantage of it, and even
also by people who do not. What’s more, he concluded that the only way in which
the extended parental leave would not hurt employees is if it is largely supported
by much wealthier tax payers. In addition, there is no doubt that parental
leave is necessary for parents, since the vulnerability of infants really
matters and they couldn’t always rely on private institutes’ service, according
to May (2016). According to the
literature review above, I think it is reasonable to make the following
hypothesis: most students would believe that the parental leave itself is
necessary for parents.
Even though parental leave is provided,
employers would try to let their employees take the leave to the least extent
by proposing particular policies, which could create a recessive discrimination
on those who take full parental leaves in the end. As Dearborn (2016) said
taking parental leave leads mothers to be cut off from important projects,
promotions and raises. Moreover, Mayer (2016) mentioned that the result of a
survey in which 36% of men would not take parental leave since they thought taking
parental leave could be seen as a sign of a lack of commitment. In this case,
nearly all parents need to process an inevitable trade-off between holidays and
stereotype before they make the final decision. According to the literature review above, I think it is
reasonable to make the following hypothesis: most students would believe that
the widely recessive discrimination on employees who take full parental leaves
is the main reason that would cause them to hesitate when it was available for
them to take full parental leave.
However, there are still some employers
giving prefect examples to employees and also other fellows for promoting the parental
leave. For instance, Garcia (2016) mentioned that Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg
took a parental leave of about two months, which exceeded that of most of the
parents in America. In other words, bosses taking parental leave is one of the
keys to supporting parental leave substantially. In addition, many high-tech
companies in Silicon Valley, such as Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Adobe and
Netfix, provide fully paid parental leave, according to Greenburg (2015). Those
companies regard the policy of paid parental leave as an attraction for both
current and prospective qualified employees. Finally, they would gain better
long-run outcomes in terms of direct profit and human resources. Tech companies
always change the way of people’s lives, as they do while promoting parental
leave. As Peck (2015) mentioned, some banking companies planned to extend the
length of paid maternal leave since they have to compete with tech companies at
all rounds. In the end, there could be more companies offering better quality
parental leave. According to the
literature review above, I think it is reasonable to make the following
hypothesis: most students would believe that whether a company provides parental
leave becomes an important issue when one is comparing several offers in hand.
As Bluethmann (2016) said, most men take
much less or even no paternal leave, since they are quite largely influenced by
the stereotype of male shaped by their companies and the society. A lot of
people ignore the importance of paternal leave, even the electorate of an American
president. As Bethell (2016) mentioned, Donald Trump announced a proposal of
six weeks parental leave but it didn’t cover the needs of fathers at all.
However, as time passes by, more fathers have become aware of that their care
for their child is important to their wives. And some companies have begun to
make parental leave neutral of genders and provided parental leave tot fathers
as well, according to Pinsker (2016). According to the literature review above, I think it is reasonable to
make the following hypothesis: most students would believe that fatherhood
plays an important role in raising infants and men’s awareness of their equal
rights helps promoting both maternal leave and paternal leave; thus, they will
say that paternal leave should be improved in the future as well.
Method
Section
We aimed to analyze the perception of people in Texas Tech University of
several different social issues, including social media, parental leave and
Black Lives Matter. Thus we designed a corresponding questionnaire and
collected data after giving out and circulating questionnaires on campus. I was
especially interested in people’s perception of men’s attitude towards parental
leave; thus I designed the eighth and ninth questions of the parental leave
section.
The two-page questionnaire used for the
survey consisted of detailed demographic questions of age, gender, educational
level, hometown and family status, and three sections corresponding to these
three separate social issues we were collectively interested in. 18 questions
were prepared for measuring people’s perception of social media on the first
page, nine questions were for parental leave, and another nine were for Black
Lives Matter, both on the second page. Most questions required volunteers to
choose a single scale representing their perception of social issues. The characteristic
of easy reading and writing could balance for the big volume of the
questionnaire.
For the data collecting, we made an
agreement that each student of our class took 13 questionnaires at the
beginning. Among the questionnaires, six were for men, six were for women and
the last one was for he or she to complete himself or herself. On one morning I
gave out mine at different places, including my department, the engineering
center, the chemistry building, the SUB, and the library. Most people were
willing to help me as long as I explained clearly about the process and chose
the people that were not busy. What surprised me was that they were all
interested in these social topics selected. In the end, I got only five refusals,
and exactly 12 surveys of exact equal sex ratio. All surveys were valid since
my volunteers completed all questions perfectly.
For two classes of academic writing,
there were 294 people (students, faculty and staff) from Texas Tech University
volunteering to participate in the survey, including 149 men and 144 women,
ranging in age from 18 to over 29 years old. The ratio of sex was kept almost
balanced. Data of uncompleted surveys were eliminated automatically to ensure
the validity. However, we still could not make sure that volunteers were
exactly randomly selected from the whole population in Texas Tech University,
due to our limited time and funding. We have to admit that rather than doing a
scientific research on social issues, experiencing the writing process was our
major concern.
Result
Section
Having collected all the
data from our 289 valid questionnaires of parental leave, now I am able to
judge my previous hypotheses based on people’s perceptions. Firstly, we could
not simply speculate that most students would believe the coverage of parental
leave would become stagnant unless federal governments interfere with the parental
leave’s issue, as which was stated in my literature review and hypothesis part
posted at the beginning. The first question of the questionnaire is the one that
could effectively test people’s perception for my first hypothesis. If one
agrees that the government should make and mandate policy of parental leave, he
or she tends to agree with my hypothesis. We could see that more than half of
the volunteers chose ‘yes’. However, there is also a substantial portion of
non-positive answers such as ‘no’ and ‘don’t know’. To be specific, 56% of
people chose ‘yes’, 23% of people chose ‘don’t know’, while the remaining 21%
of people chose ‘no’ according to the survey’s results. In my opinion, 56%
could not be simply defined as ‘most’ so I wouldn’t derive the agreement with
my first hypothesis directly.
Secondly, we could partly reject the
hypothesis that most students would believe recessive discrimination from boss
and peer would hamper their motivation to take full parental leaves. The second
question of the questionnaire asked people’s perception for that exactly. If
one’s answer is ‘no’, he or she would be more inclined to admit the influence
of recessive discrimination on making decisions. What’s more, people selecting
‘yes’ could also be sort of aware of the potential discrimination though they finally
chose to do what they thought was good for babies under the scheme of their
companies. In a word, we should not simply wipe out those people choosing ‘yes’
while estimating the perception of discrimination on taking parental leaves. Here
we assume that people selecting ‘yes’ have overall less tendency to be aware of
the discrimination than those selecting ‘no’ or ‘maybe’. According to the
survey’s results, more people chose ‘yes’ or ‘maybe’ rather than ‘no’. Actually
there were only 14% of people answering ‘no’, 27% of people answering ‘maybe’
and the remaining of 59% of people answering ‘yes’.
Thirdly, the hypothesis that most students
would regard parental leave as an important bonus while choosing offers should
be partly accepted. The third question of the questionnaire collected people’s
perception of that. He or she would be in strong favor of my hypothesis as long
as the answer is ‘yes’, and the answer of ‘maybe’ represents weaker support as
well. From my perspective, people would not care about the existence of
parental leave at all if they were strongly opposed to parental leave, or at least
didn’t regard it as a vital welfare desired. In other words, it is reasonable
for us to assume that the more positive his or her answer is, the more
important parental leave is. According to the survey’s results, more people
voted for ‘yes’ than ‘maybe’ and ‘no’, and the portion showing the strong favor
exceeds the half. To be specific, 56% of people voted for ‘yes’, 25% of people
voted for ‘maybe’ while the rest 19% of people voted for ‘no’.
Then, we could not simply speculate
that most students believe paternal leave should be improved in the future,
which was presented in my literature review and hypothesis part posted at the
beginning. The seventh question of the questionnaire asked volunteer to select
an ideal scale representing the portion of paternal leave to maternal leave in
the future. This question could clearly reveal people’s perception for what we
should do towards paternal leave, since the assumed given length of maternal
and paternal leave in the questionnaire are quite closed to what they are now,
which I can assure is true after thorough literature review about the current
condition of parental leave in the United States. In general, answers of
‘parental leave should be extended’ and ‘paternal leave should be equal to maternity
leave’ show agreement with my hypothesis because the assumed proportion is
twelve. In addition, more people chose ‘paternal leave should be extended’ and
‘paternal leave should be equal to maternal leave’ over other non-positive
answers, according to the results. Actually, 61% of people voted for those two
positive answers, and 25% of people opposed improving paternal leave, while the
other 14% showed discernment or neutrality for this issue. In my opinion, 61%
could not simply be defined as ‘most’, either.
For my hypothesis testing people’s
perception of the necessity of parental leave, we could regard it as kind of similar
to the third hypothesis discussing the importance of parental leave. Thus, the
second question of the questionnaire gives a direct instruction. Now we could
analyze the perception even more simply. Those who answered ‘No’, don’t care about
paid parental leave while choosing offers. They would show a negative attitude
towards the necessity of parental leave as well. According to the survey’s
results, more people voted for ‘yes’ than ‘maybe’ and ‘no’, and the portion
showing negative attitude is small. To be specific, 56% of people voted for
‘yes’, 25% of people voted for ‘maybe’ while 19% of people voted for ‘no’. Similarly,
we partly accept the hypothesis in the end.
I still found some more valuable
results other than those that could be directly linked to my hypothesis. From
the result of the eighth question of the questionnaire, we could find that in
general, men and women’s perception of unmarried men’s attitude towards
parental leave are surprisingly closed to each other. For example, 39 women and
41 men chose ‘yes’ toward the question, seven women and eight men chose ‘no’,
46 women and 44 men chose ‘may be’, while 26 women and 26 men chose ‘don’t
know’. In conclusion, based on the mutual perception, there would be 14% of
single men choosing ‘yes’, 3% of single man choosing ‘no’, and 16% of single men
choosing ‘may be’, while 9% of single men would choose ‘don’t know’ towards the
question. In general, both groups of men and women present positive belief on
single men’s perception of paid parental leave, since positive answers are more
than negative ones. Moreover, when single men face the question, their
collective response desires analyzing since it represents single men’s common
sense towards the question directly. Nevertheless, we could not get the desired
data of single men since we have no one choice showing their single status or
not in the demographic part of the questionnaire, which could be improved for
the next time to gather more deep conclusions.
What’s more, if people chose a positive
answer towards the first question, there is higher possibility for them to
choose a positive answer towards the sixth question, compared with those
choosing non-positive answer to the first question. In other words, these two
questions show somehow similar interests inherently. Now to judge the attitude
towards the sixth question, we would calculate the average number. The number
ranges from one to five and the larger the number is, the more benefit parental
leave would bring to us. According to the survey’s result, the response of
those having chosen ‘yes’ for the first question to the sixth question is 3.9,
the response of those having chosen ‘don’t know’ for the first question to the
sixth question is 3.6, while the one of those having chosen ‘no’ is 2.8. These
results show that there are some correlations of people’s perception of
governmental-driven policy on parental leave and the outcome parental leave
could bring to the whole society. The more they agree that government should
make mandatory polices for parental leave, the more likely they consider
parental leave beneficial.
Discussion
Section
Though many of my hypotheses could
only be partially accepted or rejected, there are still lots of issues desiring
further discussion. From the results we found that they showed overall a more
positive attitude towards paid parental leave. Slightly more than half of
people proposed governmental-driven policies, and believed in the benefits of
paid parental leave. This is a bit different from my prediction of their
perceptions, and there are three probable reasons to illustrate their overall
perceptions here.
Firstly, students are more inclined to
be so-called idealists regarding social welfare issues, compared with elder
people, according to my own experience. Definitely, almost everyone knows that the
welfare, like paid parental leave, is better than nothing if no one needs to
pay for it in the end. However, there must be some people paying for the
welfare, which is a fact that couldn’t be rejected at all. Then things become totally
different, even if you insist on supporting paid parental leave after knowing
and admitting the fact. From my perspective, students are relatively lacking in
social experience in general, so they tend to make things simpler than elder
people especially when different stakeholders are included in the complex issue.
In other words, students might care about the value most, though some of them
admit that it would be utopian to pursue the value based on their social
perceptions.
Secondly, for the particular occasion
when Texas joined the union and the solid foundation of conservative value,
most residents in Texas tend to reject union governmental intervention. In
addition, paid parental leave is partly a representative of governmental
intervention in the United States, too. So I made the hypothesis that Tech
students would show overall negative attitudes to parental leave. However, don’t
neglect that there are still lots of students from outside Texas taking our
survey. Though it is reasonable to speculate that they were attracted by Tech
since they pleasantly accepted the prevalent conservative value in west Texas
at the beginning, I don’t think value is the only criteria for students to
choose a target university. They might consider financial or scholastic issues
as well. For example, if a student plan to major in Petroleum Engineering, he
or she might be strongly interested in Tech. If a student in poverty really
desires undergraduate-level education and only Tech provides financial aids
with him or her among different offers, he or she might come to Tech directly. In
a word, Tech students outside Texas might agree or disagree with the
conservative value here, since the basis of selecting target universities could
be highly diversified, which makes Tech students respond quite differently to
parental leave. Some people think that when students outside Texas are immersed
in the conservative value in west Texas, they might be influenced more or less.
I think that’s correct but the influence from non-Texas students to Texas
students could occur as well. Thus we could not simply speculate that only
students become conservative but no ones become liberal after several years
study in Tech. Moreover, we could not label one Texas student as conservative
or label one non-Texas student as liberal, since everyone is an individual
though collective values exist.
Finally, some students
may benefit a lot from other social welfare proposed by governments at
different stages, so they might show overall positive attitudes to similar
policies driven by governments unconsciously.
Moreover, we have to admit that the
survey could be improved a lot in the future. In the first place, the process
of collecting data could be designed to be more evenly distributed within the
university. From my perspective, the distribution should consider different
locations or time as well, besides just controlling for sex ratio. You might
have the higher probability getting similar responses over a specific social issue
if you receive questionnaires from only one place as opposed to different
places. For example, you would find that students of social science are more
likely to agree that paid parental leave is necessary, and you would find them
more frequently if you choose to allocate your questionnaires just outside the building
of social science in Texas Tech University. What’s more, we have to notice that
even students without social experience could be current or potential stakeholders
for a social issue too, which could affect their attitudes unconsciously.
Secondly, the questionnaire itself
could be further revised as well, since many questions don’t provide perfect
direction to our hypotheses at all. At the beginning, every one of us had to
make five hypotheses. Nevertheless, the size of the questionnaire was rather limited,
and finally only two questions were uploaded. It is hard to make two questions
cover all hypotheses made before. In addition, some questions need further
explanation. For instance, the last question of parental leave initially was
designed to test people’s perception of whether other groups of employees
should be taken into consideration or not, other than pregnant women. However,
it used ‘broaden the coverage’, which was quite vague. And the way it asks
should be revised as well since there shouldn’t be an incompatible relationship
between extending pregnant women’s length of paid parental leave and further
care of other groups’ welfare at all. For the eighth question, we wanted to
test the perception of unmarried men but we forgot to add the choices of
marital status in the demographic part. The filter could provide us with great
comparison of humans’ perceptions.
Conclusion
According to the data of our survey,
basic judgements on five hypotheses towards Tech students’ perceptions was
made. Most of these judgements gave us the impression that more than half of
Tech’s students tended to favor both maternal and paternal leave, admit
parental leave’s necessity and benefits, and even support governmental-driven
policies on parental leave issues. Nevertheless, the impression was quite
different to what I thought they would like to be. To illustrate the
difference, probably we have to consider the ordinary value hold by younger
people on social welfare issues innately, the potential of their identity of
stakeholder on social welfare issues and the diversified reasons of coming to
Tech for study. Moreover, we shouldn’t neglect the huge potential of our
questionnaire’s revising, which could influence our research.
Appendix
Survey Link
Bibliography
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