A family is considered a working family when, “All family members age 15 and older either have a combined work effort of 39 weeks or more in the prior 12 months OR all family members age 15 and older have a combined work effort of 26 to 39 weeks in the prior 12 months, and one unemployed parent looked for work in the prior four weeks” (Waldron, Roberts, & Reamer, 2004, p.12).
“Working families defined: average annual hours worked per year across all adult family members (age 18 to 65) exceeds 1,000 hours. Other methods of defining a working family have typically focused solely on the most active worker in the household. In order to see how the above definition compares to these single-worker definitions, three alternatives are generated based on ascending levels of workforce attachment. Alternative one: working at least 14 weeks for 35 plus hours per week, or working at least 27 weeks for 20 plus hours per week. Alternative two: working at least 27 weeks for 35 plus hours per week or working at least 40 weeks for 20 hours per week. Alternative three: working at least 40 weeks for 35 plus hours per week (Mills, Whitacre, & Hilmer, 2005).”
“A working family is defined as one in which total number of hours worked by all adult members of the family is 20 or more hours per week (Hargraves, 2004).”
“Working families are defined as families with a non-elderly, non-disabled head of household whose income is reported by HUD [the Department of Housing and Urban Development] to be ‘primarily from earnings.’ Most of these households have children, but some do not (Sard, & Fischer, 2003).”
“Low- to moderate-income working families are defined as those who work the equivalent of a full-time job and earn between the minimum wage of $10,712 and up to 120 percent of the median income in their area (Lipman, 2002).”
“Today everybody is part of a working family. There’s no single model; it’s not the old stereotype of the male breadwinner with the wife at home taking care of the family and community needs. That situation represents less than twenty percent of people that work today. We have working families of all varieties, from the sole breadwinner to the majority of families where there are two parents in the workforce, not necessarily both working full-time, but with various working time arrangements. Other possible situations include single parent families where one parent has full responsibility for all work and family needs as well as families where parents are not in the workforce and the children are growing up on public assistance without any role models in the workplace. There are also other variations of working families, from people with partners who have children and are sharing responsibility for them to grandparents and other relatives involved in parenting and economic support. Families are very diverse. Likewise, workers are very diverse; some work part-time, some work full-time, some have situations in which there’s steady employment, and others work from time to time (Casey & Corday, 2006).”