Family & career in Burgenland

This empirical study focussed on the question of the "compatibility of family and career in Burgenland". The results of this study are quite diverse and can be summarised in four major themes, which are also reflected in the title: Firstly, Burgenlanders are highly satisfied with the various childcare services on offer. Secondly, the results show that traditional role models and values are still very much based on the traditional family ideal. Despite numerous formal information channels, Burgenland residents do not always have access to the information they need to carefully plan their "work-life balance". Ultimately, the practices and actual framework conditions reveal regional differences within Burgenland, which also require different strategies. The results are briefly summarised and presented below.

However, it also became clear - similar to the organisation of care relationships (Luimpöck/Wallner/Fürst, 2015) and the entry of refugees into the labour market (Luimpöck/Fürst, 2015) - that family networks and social spaces play a key role in childcare. Grandparents and parents-in-law play an important role, but are rarely used as a reliable, always available and indefinite "reserve", as parents are aware of the volatility of this offer, for example in the event of illness. The case of parents using their children's grandparents as a childcare resource that completely replaces the institutional childcare provision of a crèche was only found in one municipality, where the decision was ultimately made to place the child with the mother-in-law for a period of 6 months due to a real shortage in the local kindergarten. The relevance of family networks is high, but they are overestimated as a resilient and reliable resource that can replace institutional childcare.

One realisation that ultimately runs like a common thread through the entire study is that nationally applicable standards and guidelines in the area of childcare and the associated issues are implemented differently in the respective municipalities and regions. This makes planning difficult for many parents, especially when it comes to the key issues of "reconciling family and career". This is where three of the four strands identified above culminate, namely information deficits, awareness-raising and regional differences, and often coincidentally construct the framework conditions, e.g. for childcare as an essential basis for "reconciliation between family and work".