Time Diary Data Research Articles

Gender Disparities in Parenting Time Across Activities, Child Ages, and Educational Groups

Although gender gaps in parenting time endure for parents of young children, and in physical and developmental care, men’s changing attitudes toward egalitarian gender roles suggest that gender disparities in parenting time may have closed in some contexts: particularly, in other shared activities with children, when children are school aged or older, and among higher educated parents. We investigate these possibilities using weekday time diary data from a nationally representative survey of parents participating in the American Time Use Survey (2003-2014; N = 28,698). In contrast to our expectations, we find that the gender gap in parents’ time with children persists when children are older, and even grow for some activities; extend to several other forms of shared parent–child time; and is often largest for higher educated parents. At the same time, there are notable contexts in which the gaps disappear, although they encompass the most pleasant activities, and least intensive stages of parenting.

Doing it All? Mothers' College Enrollment, Time Use, and Affective Well-being.

The rising share of women in college with dependent children and growing emphasis on two-generation policies for reducing socioeconomic inequality have galvanized research aimed at determining whether mothers' increased education can improve their and their children's well-being. Yet as part of this effort, scholars have overlooked signs that mothers' college enrollment may not be unequivocally good for families. This research brief aims to bring greater attention to this "side of the story." To do so, we analyze time diary (2003-2015) and well-being data (2010, 2011, 2013) from the American Time Use Survey. We find that mothers in college experience a time squeeze that limits their time in caregiving, self-care, and work, on one hand, and school-related activities on the other. This time squeeze may explain why mothers enrolled in college (compared to mothers who were not in school) also reported less happiness and more fatigue during activities with their children.

Why are Professors 'Poorly Paid'?

Using Current Population Survey data, I demonstrate a 15-percentage point wage disadvantage among academics compared to all other doctorate-holders with the same demographics. Time-diary data show that academics' workhours are distributed more evenly over the week and day, although their total workweeks are equally long. This smoother distribution of work time accounts for as much as one-third of the wage disadvantage. Survey data (of economists only) indicate that flexible scheduling is an attraction, but only fourth among the characteristics of academic life.

Adolescent caretaking of younger siblings

Sibling interactions play important roles in socialization; however, little is known about sibling caretaking in contemporary families. This study examined the prevalence of adolescents providing care for younger siblings and the quality of care as associated with a broad spectrum of individual, microsystem, and macrosystem factors. Relying on nationally representative time diary data from the American Time Use Survey, we found that factors at multiple levels (individual, microsystem, and macrosystem) were associated with sibling caretaking. Gendered patterns in caretaking emerged. The caretaker’s sex and the ages and sexes of younger siblings correlated with the incidence and quality of sibling care. Boys more often cared for younger brothers, and girls more often cared for younger sisters. In addition, boys more often played with younger siblings while girls more often provided physical care and talked with younger siblings, mirroring gendered patterns seen in parents.

Unilateral Divorce and Time Allocation in the United States

ABSTRACTUsing time-diary data from the Time Use in Economic and Social Accounts (TUESA) 1975–76, which covers heterosexual couples in the United States, this paper analyzes the relationship between a state’s adoption of unilateral divorce and couples’ time allocation. Married women in states with unilateral divorce spend less time on core housework than those in states without unilateral divorce, and married men contribute to a greater share of housework. This paper also uses cross-state and time variation in divorce law adoption by including additional data from the early 1990s to estimate the effect of a state’s adoption of unilateral divorce on daily time use. The analysis confirms the findings for women in the 1970s: the availability of unilateral divorce substantially decreases married women’s time spent on housework. The results suggest that the adoption of unilateral divorce law shifts the relative bargaining power within heterosexual married households to women.

For Better or Worse? Couples' Time Together in Encore Adulthood.

This study examined the amount of time married couples share together in a new "encore adult" life course stage around the 50s, 60s, and 70s. Also investigated was the relationship between shared time and experienced well-being for this age group. Time diary and survey data were used from nationally representative 2003-2014 American Time Use Survey (ATUS) data for 26,303 adults aged 50-79 years. Analyses examined amount of total and exclusive shared couple time and experiences of happiness and stress when together using multivariate models. Shared time was positively associated with couples living on their own, conjoint employment/nonemployment, and age. Encore women and men reported feeling happier and less stressed when with their spouses. Men seemed to find time with spouses more enjoyable if both partners or just their wives were working. Encore adults are living longer as couples; results suggest couple relationships may occupy most of their days, with potentially positive implications for emotional well-being. Men and women are happier during time with a spouse when the woman works, with men reporting even higher levels of happiness than women. This is important as contemporary couples navigate increasingly complex work/retirement transitions in gendered ways.

Parents’ work schedules and time spent with children

ABSTRACTThis paper adds to the growing body of research on the overlap between work and family by investigating the relationship between attributes of work schedules for parents and the amount of time they spend with their children. Nationally representative time diary data from the American Time Use Survey is used to calculate the amount of time parents spend with children on a random day, and these data are merged with the CPS Work Schedules Supplement which provides information on the respondent’s usual work schedule, such as having a flexible schedule, variable start and stop times, working from home, or a day schedule. The results show that though some work schedule attributes have little influence on the amount of time parents spend with children, certain aspects of the timing of work are related to the total time parents spend with their children. The attributes of work schedules are also found to be associated with the amount of time spent in specific activities with children.

What Are Men Doing While Women Perform Extra Unpaid Labor? Leisure and Specialization at the Transition to Parenthood.

Marriage has significantly changed since Becker proposed his specialization model yet some scholars maintain that specialization characterizes modern couples. Specialization occurs when one partner, traditionally the man, concentrates on market work while the other partner, traditionally the woman, focuses on nonmarket work such as housework or childcare. Using innovative time diary data from primarily highly-educated, White, dual-earner U.S. couples, we examine how couples manage their time in market and household work and leisure across a momentous, gendered life course turning point-the transition to parenthood. We find little evidence of specialization, but stronger evidence of nonspecialization where both partners concurrently engaged in market work or leisure. Yet gender still mattered. Men enjoyed more leisure time, particularly on nonworkdays, whereas their partners performed more nonmarket work. Our study is the first known to uncover exactly what men were doing while women performed additional minutes of housework and childcare. On nonworkdays, fathers engaged in leisure 47% and 35% of the time during which mothers performed childcare and routine housework, respectively. Mothers engaged in leisure only about 16% to 19% of the time that fathers performed childcare and routine housework. In sum, although our study challenges economic theories of specialization by showing that nonspecialization is the norm for new parents' time among highly-educated, dual-earner couples, persistent gender inequalities continue to characterize family work and leisure time.

Time to learn? Time allocations among children in South Africa

We investigate the time allocations of children (10–17 years) in South Africa using nationally representative time-diary data. We show that racial variation in time allocations mirrors well-documented findings of racially differentiated schooling outcomes. African children spend significantly less time on learning activities than other children, particularly outside school hours. They also spend significantly more time on household and production work and on school-related travel. We use regression analysis to investigate whether these race differences persist among children in households with similar socio-economic characteristics; and we explore whether children’s subjective time evaluations reveal evidence of greater time pressure among African children.

Mothers' Time, the Parenting Package, and Links to Healthy Child Development.

Studies consistently show that mothers' time in particular activities with children is positively associated with child well-being, but results are mixed regarding associations between child outcomes and the sheer amount of time that mothers spend with children. Using time diary and survey data from three waves of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics Child Development Supplement (N = 2,622), we assess whether gains from mothers' total time with children vary by the quality of mothers' other investments in children, or the "parenting package." Mother-child shared time was associated with children's broad reading scores and adolescents' externalizing behavior, but mothers' other parenting investments did not moderate these associations. Results were robust to alternative measures of mothers' time and to the incorporation of earlier assessments of child academic and behavior problems. Parenting investments may be indicative of the quality of children's home environments but do not magnify gains from mother-child shared time.

Speed-Up Society? Evidence from the UK 2000 and 2015 Time Use Diary Surveys

Using time diary evidence on change in the frequency and distribution of activities from UK time diary data over the 15 years from the turn of the 21st century, we assess whether the thesis of ‘the speed-up society’ is manifested in an increase in time intensity in people’s daily lives. Comparing indictors like time fragmentation, multitasking and ICT use, to respondents’ reports of how rushed they normally feel, we find no evidence that time pressure is increasing, or that ICT use is associated with greater feelings of time pressure. Rather, we find consistent cross-sectional differentials in our measures of time intensity by gender and occupational status, supporting the idea of relative stasis in the underlying social inequalities of time. These findings are consistent with previous research based on time use data, and we pose them as a challenge to theories of societal speed-up.

Gender differences in within-couple influences on work–family balance satisfaction: when benefits become threats

ABSTRACTUsing the 2010 General Social Survey in Time Use (Canadian time diary data, N = 1785), we explore the impact of spouses’ time spent on childcare and other work–family factors on parents’ work–family balance satisfaction. We examine how benefits compare to threats to parenting time and the relative impact on satisfaction with work–family balance. Our findings indicate that benefits to parenting time (working regular shift, fewer hours, and flextime) increase work–family balance. Threats to parenting (hiring of childcare, spouse’s household labour), which should benefit work–family balance, decrease satisfaction. We find mothers’ satisfaction with work–family balance is unaffected by increased childcare time spent by fathers. In contrast, mothers’ increased childcare time is associated with lower satisfaction with work–family balance for fathers. We argue Canadian fathers may be feeling increased cultural pressure to participate more fully in parenting. Fathers potentially perceive mothers’ predominant parenting as a threat to new expectations while mothers perceive fathers’ new expectations as a benefit. Alternatively, fathers may feel neglected as a result of mothers’ focus on parenting.

Leisure Luxuries and the Labor Supply of Young Men

We propose a methodology exploiting time diary data and “leisure Engel curves” to infer quality changes across leisure activities and measure the effects on the marginal return to leisure. We study leisure returns for men aged 21–30, who have shifted leisure toward video gaming and recreational computing and have had larger market work hour declines than older men or women since 2004. We show that recreational computing is distinctly a leisure luxury for younger men. By increasing the value of time, innovations to this leisure technology have lowered young men's work hours by 2%, or much of their work hours decline compared to older men's.

Parents' Nonstandard Work Hours and Children's Time Use in Spain: The Intersection of Parental Work Schedules, Gender, and Education

This study uses time-diary data from two-parent families with children aged 10-16 (N = 913) to analyse how parental work schedules interfere with children’s daily activities in Spain, a country where evening work is strongly institutionalised. Fathers’ work schedules are generally unrelated to children’s time use. Mothers’ evening work hours are significantly associated to less time on “developmental” family and educational activities, and with more time spent watching television and doing electronic activities without parents, two potentially “risky” activities in developmental terms. These associations generally apply to less-educated mothers, but not to high-educated mothers. On weekends, children with mothers who were more active on evening work during the week disproportionately participate in educational and family activities, reflecting partly a compensatory pattern in time use allocation. Overall, results suggest that constraints associated to evening work hours influence children’s daily activities, but with remarkable gendered and socioeconomic inequalities in family life.

Couples' Sleep and Psychological Distress: A Dyadic Perspective.

Research on aging has increasingly recognized sleep as a key determinant of physical and psychological well-being. The existing literature, however, considers sleep solely at the individual-level. This study constructed dyadic sleep measures and demonstrated their capacity to predict individual-level sleep and psychological distress. This study analyzed 2 waves (2009 and 2013) of older couples' same-day time diary data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics' Supplement on Disability and Use of Time. Dyadic sleep measures included: (a) bedtime differences, (b) wake-up time differences, (c) a categorical indicator of couple's sleeping routines, and (d) a categorical indicator of couple's waking routines. The measures indicated substantial discordance in the sleep habits of older couples. Results from multilevel regressions showed that waking patterns predicted individual-level sleep durations. Dyadic sleep measures, particularly sleeping patterns, independently predicted the respondents' psychological distress; controlling for sociodemographic characteristics, marital quality, and individual-level sleep measures. Patterns were more pronounced in the weekend measures. Sleep is a dyadic interpersonal process. This study demonstrated that dyadic sleep is a key aspect for older adults' sleep that cannot be reduced to individual-level sleep. Future studies and surveys should incorporate instruments to measure sleep at the couple-level.

Exploring the stable practices of everyday life: A multi-day time-diary approach

Everyday life is neither the result of mundane, common-sense, habitual human behaviour as theorized by the agency-centred approach of methodological individualism nor the sheer result of the conformation to temporal norms of the structural approach of social holism. In fact, everyday life is marked by a rhythmic, temporal structure that is brought into effect by the modality of repetitive action. In this article, a praxeological approach is used to conceptualize everyday life as a social structure in terms of its underlying stable practices. Multi-day time-diary data and optimal matching with clustering techniques show empirically that everyday life consists of stable practices that vary in function of temporal and social demands, in function of handling coordination of practice, and in function of embedding these practices in collectively shared temporal orders.

Using New Technologies for Time Diary Data Collection: Instrument Design and Data Quality Findings from a Mixed-Mode Pilot Survey

Recent years have witnessed a steady growth of time-use research, driven by the increased research and policy interest in population activity patterns and their associations with long-term outcomes. There is recent interest in moving beyond traditional paper-administered time diaries to use new technologies for data collection in order to reduce respondent burden and administration costs, and to improve data quality. This paper presents two novel diary instruments that were employed by a large-scale multi-disciplinary cohort study in order to obtain information on the time allocation of adolescents in the United Kingdom. A web-administered diary and a smartphone app were created, and a mixed-mode data collection approach was followed: cohort members were asked to choose between these two modes, and those who were unable or refused to use the web/app modes were offered a paper diary. Using data from a pilot survey of 86 participants, we examine diary data quality indicators across the three modes. Results suggest that the web and app modes yield an overall better time diary data quality than the paper mode, with a higher proportion of diaries with complete activity and contextual information. Results also show that the web and app modes yield a comparable number of activity episodes to the paper mode. These results suggest that the use of new technologies can improve diary data quality. Future research using larger samples should systematically investigate selection and measurement effects in mixed-mode time-use survey designs.

Timestyles of Unmarried Working Women: Characteristics of the Time Use by Applying Timestyle Indexes to Time Diary Data

Timestyles of Unmarried Working Women: Characteristics of the Time Use by Applying Timestyle Indexes to Time Diary Data

Measuring short and rare activities – Time diaries in criminology

Motivated by recent time use studies in criminology, this study examined whether time diaries are suitable for measuring short and rare activities such as offending. The study compared time diary data collected among 843 adolescents from the conurbation of The Hague (the Netherlands) with stylized questionnaire data from the same respondents, and with stylized questionnaire data from another sample that is representative for Dutch adolescents (N = 1849). Based on the reported offenses in the diaries (N = 101), findings indicate that time diaries may underestimate population offense rates and may not capture offenses committed by low-frequent offenders. On the other hand, time diaries seem able to measure changes in individuals' involvement in offending over time and to capture most of the situational conditions under which offenses occur. The study concludes with suggestions for dealing with the problems associated with measuring short and rare activities.

Daily Temporal Pathways: A Latent Class Approach to Time Diary Data.

Research on daily time and how it is allocated has generally considered the time spent in specific activities. However, social theory suggests that time use is socially patterned whether by social organization, heterogeneity, and/or stratification. Drawing on four broad types of time (contracted, committed, necessary, and free), we use Multinomial Logit Latent Class Analysis to discuss eight daily temporal pathways and associations with individual characteristics. Our analysis highlights the variations and similarities across pathways, the impact of paid work in structuring daily life, the social patterning of sleep and leisure, and socio-demographic profiles of the pathways of working-age Americans.