COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Most home-based workers don't fit the popular image of a woman who provides child care or who sells crafts out of her house, new research suggests.
In fact, a study of 899 home-based workers in nine states found that nearly 59 percent were male. The average home-based worker was 44 years old, married, had some education beyond high school and had been involved in work at home for nearly a decade.
"The traditional view is that home-based workers are dominated by home knitters and quilt-makers who fit their work around child care and household responsibilities," said Kathryn Stafford, associate professor of consumer sciences at Ohio State University's College of Human Ecology. "But we found that most home-based workers are men performing traditional work in fields like sales and construction."
The findings also suggest that home-based work has a strong economic impact, Stafford said. The researchers estimated that the total income generated by home-based businesses in the nine states studied was $19.7 billion a year -- about 3 percent of the total personal income generated.
"We found in Ohio, for example, that home-based work contributed more to total income than did farming," she said.
Stafford conducted the study with Barbara Rowe of Purdue University and George Haynes of Montana State University. Their results were published in a recent issue of the journal Economic Development Quarterly.
Data came from telephone interviews with members of 899 households in Hawaii, Iowa, Missouri, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Utah and Vermont. These families were identified from a random sample of more than 20,000 households contacted to see whether anyone worked at home for money.
All study participants were over 18, worked at least one day a week at home-based work, had been doing this work for at least a year, and did not have another office or work site that was their primary place of work. Farmers were excluded from the analysis.
The total sample included both home-based business owners (self-employed) and those who worked at home for outside employers. About three-fourths of the sample were home-based business owners.
The most common occupation among those surveyed was marketing and sales, which included 19 percent of the sample living in rural areas and 27 percent of those from urban areas. The average net income earned from home-based work was $20,119 for urban residents and $13,673 for rural residents (in 1988 dollars.)
Stafford said home-based businesses were found to help local economies in several ways. Participants in the study estimated that more than 60 percent of their income went for expenses. "And unlike many industries in rural communities, which buy their supplies and services from outside the local community, we found that 87 percent of business owners in our study bought supplies for their businesses within their state," she said.
In addition, about 88 percent of the home-business owners said they sold most of their products or services within their state or within an hour's drive of their homes.
"Home-based work often remains invisible to most of the public and to policy-makers who are concerned about developing local jobs and employment," Stafford said. "But it can have a significant economic impact on local economies."
Stafford said public policy-makers can do several things to help encourage home-based businesses. The most important may be to lift zoning restrictions on home businesses and to streamline license and permit procedures that are sometimes burdensome to people working out of their homes.
Local officials can also help influence credit unions, banks and other lenders to extend their loan criteria to include deserving home-based businesses that would otherwise not be able to expand their operations, she said. The research was supported by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Cooperative States Research Service and experiment stations at universities in the nine states.
The nine states in the study were not randomly selected, Stafford said, but were included because of their interest in funding the study. However, Stafford says the states are fairly representative of the United States, with the exception of the Southeast. Stafford said she is involved in new research which is extending the study to all 50 states.
Written by Jeff Grabmeier, 614-292-8457; Grabmeier.1@osu.edu
Journal
Economic Development Quarterly