The Impact of Family and Job Content on Swedish Seafarers’ Occupational Commitment – A Gendered Issue?

Ongoing research has indicated important effects on seafarers’ occupational commitment due to gender and family situation. In this study, these findings have been elaborated further by controlling for the effect of perceived work content. Statistical analyses were employed, using a survey material of Swedish seafarers collected from a national register in 2010. The results showed that the effect on occupational commitment of having children at home is strongly positive and statistically significant for women. However, the significance was dependent on the level of satisfaction with the job content. It was suggested that the seafaring occupation could be viewed as a cooping strategy, although only appropriate if the job content is agreeable. Another important family effect was, as expected, the positive effect of having a relative working, or having worked, at sea. This effect was, however, only significant for male seafarers in the age group below the early 40’s. It was concluded that this effect is mainly emotionally driven and not particularly influenced by the actual job content. The results further showed that working in the catering department comes with a strong negative effect on commitment to the seafaring occupation for women. This effect, however, lost its significance after control for job content. It was concluded that the effect of satisfaction with job content on occupational commitment is generally important, with the exception of women, without children, working in the catering department.