Abstract
The American Time-Use Survey (ATUS), conducted by the US Bureau of the Census for the Bureau of Labor Statistics, has been collecting data on how Americans spend their time since 2003, using the method of the daily time diary. In these diaries, survey respondents are asked to recall all of their activities across the previous 24 hours. In 2010, the ATUS began supplementing these simple activity accounts with ratings on five psychological states (sad, tired, stress, pain and happy) from a Social Well-Being (SWB) index designed to capture how these respondents feel as they engage in these daily activities. Thus, this ATUS study basically provides a continuous national monitor of Americans’ everyday subjective quality of life (QOL)—and in “real time” as personally experienced by respondents. Analysis of these 2010-12 ATUS SWB ratings from more than 12,000 Americans aged 15 and older reveal that women score significantly higher than men on all five factors, even though only one of the adjectives (happy) was in the positive direction. Thus, US women described their daily activities as more stressful, tiring, sad and painful, but at the same time also describing their activities as making them feel happier (suggesting that women see their lives as more engaging, intense or energizing). In order to control for this gender difference, a simple scale was derived from two of the items that conveyed basically the same emotional state, namely happy and sad. When these ratings on two items were paired, virtually no gender difference was found; nor were many gender differences found when they rated these feelings on the same activity. However, there were dramatic subjective differences across activities that were largely shared by both men and women, with child play, religious, volunteer and fitness activities rated near the top of enjoyment and with medical, housework and work activities nearer the bottom. These results seem generally consistent with enjoyment ratings in earlier national time-use surveys.
Highlights
Over the last the last 50 years, society has undergone a continual gender revolution, one that may have overshadowed earlier societal debates and changes by other demographic factors, like age, class and race
Time-diary Studies: Until recently, most measures of the time men and women spend in work, family and free time settings were based on simple survey estimates made by people of the hours they spent at work, housework or TV (e.g., “How many hours did you work last week?”), rather than on more detailed accounts of daily activity based on-site observation, electronic pagers or time diaries
Using this new and simple two-item SBW scale, these national American Time-Use Survey (ATUS) ratings of activities in Table 2 largely replicate the general feelings about engaging in various daily activities identified in previous time studies in Robinson (1993) and in Gershuny (2012), which used simpler enjoyment scales as their well-being measure
Summary
Over the last the last 50 years, society has undergone a continual gender revolution, one that may have overshadowed earlier societal debates and changes by other demographic factors, like age, class and race. The great value of these time-diary accounts (Szalai, 1972) is that workers report on all their daily activities in their own words, and not just general survey questions about their work, housework or TV time.
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