Suzanne Loker, Charles B. Hennon, and Ramona K. Z. Heck
with the assistance of Barbara R. Rowe, Mary Winter
, Margaret Fitzgerald, and George W. Haynes

Home-based work has shown growth and popularity in recent years, but what
happens to individuals who participate in it over time? As families and indi-
viduals change, how is their continuation in home-based work affected? Does
home-based work serve the needs of the individuals and families over succes-
sive years?

One way to examine the continuation of home-based work is to use job tenure
statistics for the general labor force as a baseline. As of January 1991, median
tenure for workers with the same employer was 4.5 years, and median tenure
for workers in the same occupation with the same or different employers was
6.5 years ( Maguire, 1993). The national statistics for job turnover are harder to
produce, and no usable data source exists. ¹

The average job tenure of about 9 years for the home-based workers ² in the
nine-state study might lead to the conjecture that the tenure of a home-based
worker is longer and the number of job changes fewer than for the general labor
force. More likely, home-based work was chosen because it accommodated the
life and family of the home-based worker.

Even though business continuations in any setting are difficult to measure,
examining business failures is important because the majority of the sample
were home business owners. The Small Business Administration defines busi-
ness failure as a "closure of a business causing a loss to at least one creditor"
(U.S. Small Business Administration [SBA], 1992, p. 437). A comparison of
the number of closings during the calendar years 1989 and 1990 shows that the

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