Rhona Rapoport, who has died aged 84, did pioneering research into work and family issues at a time when psychologists studied workers, while sociologists separately studied families, with no consideration of how these parts of people's lives might interact. The article Work and Family in Contemporary Society, written by Rhona and her husband Robert Rapoport, and published in American Sociological Review in 1965, challenged this traditional mindset and launched a new discipline just as women were entering the workforce in large numbers. Their study examined what they called the "normal crises" of young couples leaving university, getting married and finding their first jobs.
The Rapoports' second path-breaking work was the book Dual-Career Families (1971). Based on intensive interviews, it examined how 17 dual-career couples (where both partners have their own professional careers) managed in combining work with family, friendship, leisure and community activities, and argued for the need to rethink the ways in which paid work and family work got done by both men and women.
Published at a time when business and government leaders were finding that equal-opportunity legislation did not guarantee an adequate number of skilled women for professional positions, it started a discussion that ultimately led to widespread implementation of "family-friendly" policies in the workplace. In the 1990s, Rhona was instrumental in shifting the thinking on what were by then called "work-life" issues. As the leader of a Ford Foundation research initiative on issues of equity, conducted in collaboration with three large US corporations, she was the first to argue that it is not policies and benefits but the way work is accomplished that needs to change to alleviate work-life conflicts. She pointed the way to the emphasis on flexibility, for example in work schedules, that has spread widely in the US, the UK and beyond.
Born Rhona Ross in Cape Town, South Africa, she said that her lifelong commitment to increasing equity originated in her observations of the status of servants in her childhood home. She rebelled against her parents' wish that she settle into their lifestyle. After completing a social sciences degree at the University of Cape Town in 1946, she took a PhD in sociology at the London School of Economics. Her first marriage, to Cyril Sofer in 1947, ended in divorce.
In 1957 she completed training as a psychoanalyst at the London Institute of Psychoanalysis and married Robert Rapoport, an American social anthropologist. Until the mid-1960s, they lived in Boston, Massachusetts, where Rhona was director of family research at the community mental health programme of the Harvard Medical School and School of Public Health.
They then moved to London, where they both became associated with the Tavistock Institute. In 1973 they established the Institute for Family and Environmental Research, and served as co-directors until Robert's death in 1996. Rhona closed the institute in 2009. Partners in much of their research and writing, the Rapoports lived their ideals, agreeing early on in their marriage that neither would take on full-time work so that they could maintain the quality of personal life they wanted for themselves and their children.
Early on, the Rapoports developed an approach to studying families that they called "collaborative interviewing and interactive research", a form of action research that actively engages the research subjects as partners in the investigation. Rhona was a master of this technique and, in the 1980s and 1990s, developed it into an effective approach to working with organisations.
Rhona wrote or co-wrote more than 20 books and many articles. Latterly, she challenged the popular mantra of finding "balance" between work and personal life. Beyond Work-Family Balance (2002) showed that allowing personal-life considerations into the workplace can help workers increase their effectiveness as well as their quality of life.
For more than 20 years she served as a consultant to the Ford Foundation. In the 1990s she was a distinguished fellow and adviser at the Centre for Gender in Organisations at the Simmons Graduate School of Management in Boston. In 2009 she was honoured by the organisation Working Families "for her sustained and influential research and new thinking in the field of work and family life".
Rhona was not a scholar for scholarship's sake but was passionate about changing the world. Her effect on the people she worked with was to make sure they worried about how to make things better. She operated in an open, collaborative style and always posed the most challenging questions.
Rhona is survived by a daughter and a son, and her grandchildren.
• Rhona Valerie Rapoport, social scientist, born 29 January 1927; died 24 November 2011
• This article was amended on 11 January 2012. It originally gave the date of Rhona Rapoport's death as 4 November 2011. This has been corrected.
