Changes in American Daily Life: 1965–2005

Abstract

This article borrows heavily from and summarizes a longer version produced last year by Fisher et al. (2007), and we are grateful as well for further discussions with Kimberly Fisher and Jonathan Gershuny to prepare this article. It first describes the 2006 American Heritage Time Use Study (AHTUS), developed by the Centre for Time Use Research (CTUR) at the Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of Essex, and now housed at Oxford University. The AHTUS merges the new American Time Use Survey (ATUS), collected on a continuous basis beginning in 2003 by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), with four previous national time-use studies collected at the University of Maryland and the University of Michigan. The resulting harmonized format makes it appropriate for a wide range of economic and sociological analyses. It is used here to identify several types of social change in the US across the latter half of the twentieth century. First focus is on changes in the distribution of paid and unpaid work tasks over the period 1965-2003, looking also at the implications for free time and personal care given the valuable "zero-sum" property of time?so that if time on one activity (like work) increases or decreases, it must be "zero-ed out" by parallel decreases or increases in other activities.