Time Diary Data Research Articles

Measuring the relative productivity of multitasking to sole-tasking in household production: experimental evidence

The standard household production model does not incorporate multitasking, although time-diary data reveal that individuals regularly multitask. We incorporate multitasking into a household production model in which time spent in childcare can be sole-tasked or multitasked with another household production activity and we present the results of an experiment designed to measure the productivity parameters of this model. Because utility and productivity are intertwined and difficult to disentangle in any household production model, we vary the utility pay-offs our experimental participants receive in order to determine how our estimated productivity parameters are affected by a change in the utility parameters. Our estimates of the relative multitasking productivities indicate that, while a minute of sole-tasked time produces more of a single commodity than a minute of multitasked time, total household output increases when two outputs are produced simultaneously, hence confirming the economic motivation for multitasking.

Fathers’ child care time and mothers’ paid work: A cross-national study of Denmark, Spain, and the United Kingdom

In this study we use time-diary data from Denmark, Spain, and the United Kingdom to analyze how fathers’ child care differs across countries with distinct gender norms, family policies, and maternal employment rates. We pay particular attention to the role of mothers’ paid work time in influencing paternal child care. Results show that Danish fathers display the most involved child care behavior. Spanish fathers spend more time in child care than UK fathers, but Spanish fathers are less egalitarian than UK fathers regarding the relative contribution to the couple’s child care time. Women’s paid work is significantly associated with men’s routine child care, the most time-demanding and female-typed forms of parenting, but not with men’s interactive child care. The study suggests that maternal employment partly drives cross-national differences in fathers’ child care time, implying that women’s employment policies can influence active paternal involvement.

Measurement Directiveness as a Cause of Response Bias

Extant research comparing survey self-reports of normative behavior to direct observations and time diary data have yielded evidence of extensive measurement bias. However, most of this research program has relied on observational data, comparing independent samples from the same target population, rather than comparing survey self-reports to a criterion measure for individual respondents. This research addresses the next step using data from two studies. In each study, respondents completed a conventional survey questionnaire, including questions about frequency of religious behavior. Respondents were then asked to participate in a text messaging (short message service) data collection procedure, reporting either (1) participation in religious behavior specifically or (2) all changes in major activity without explicitly specifying religious behavior. Findings suggest that directive measurement, priming the respondent to consider the focal behavior, is a cause of measurement bias.

When does time matter? maternal employment, children's time with parents, and child development.

This study tests the two assumptions underlying popularly held notions that maternal employment negatively affects children because it reduces time spent with parents: (1) that maternal employment reduces children's time with parents, and (2) that time with parents affects child outcomes. We analyze children's time-diary data from the Child Development Supplement of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and use child fixed-effects and IV estimations to account for unobserved heterogeneity. We find that working mothers trade quantity of time for better "quality" of time. On average, maternal work has no effect on time in activities that positively influence children's development, but it reduces time in types of activities that may be detrimental to children's development. Stratification by mothers' education reveals that although all children, regardless of mother's education, benefit from spending educational and structured time with their mothers, mothers who are high school graduates have the greatest difficulty balancing work and child care. We find some evidence that fathers compensate for maternal employment by increasing types of activities that can foster child development as well as types of activities that may be detrimental. Overall, we find that the effects of maternal employment are ambiguous because (1) employment does not necessarily reduce children's time with parents, and (2) not all types of parental time benefit child development.

Gender and time allocation of cohabiting and married women and men in France, Italy, and the United States.

BACKGROUNDWomen, who generally do more unpaid and less paid work than men, have greater incentives to stay in marriages than cohabiting unions, which generally carry fewer legal protections for individuals that wish to dissolve their relationship. The extent to which cohabitation is institutionalized, however, is a matter of policy and varies substantially by country. The gender gap in paid and unpaid work between married and cohabiting individuals should be larger in countries where cohabitation is less institutionalized and where those in cohabiting relationships have relatively fewer legal protections should the relationship dissolve, yet few studies have explored this variation.OBJECTIVEUsing time diary data from France, Italy, and the United States, we assess the time men and women devote to paid and unpaid work in cohabiting and married couples. These three countries provide a useful diversity in marital regimes for examining these expectations: France, where cohabitation is most “marriage like” and where partnerships can be registered and carry legal rights; the United States, where cohabitation is common but is short-lived and unstable and where legal protections vary across states; and Italy, where cohabitation is not common and where such unions are not legally acknowledged and less socially approved than in either France or the United States.RESULTSCohabitating men’s and women’s time allocated to market and nonmarket work is generally more similar than married men and women. Our expectations about country differences are only partially borne out by the findings. Greater gender differences in the time allocated to market and nonmarket work are found in Italy relative to either France or the U.S.

Merging Separate Spheres: The Role of Policy in Promoting ‘Dual-Earner Dual-Carer’ Households

There has been a recent trend in policy-making towards incentivizing fathers to take parental leave in order to boost women's labor market positions. Though paternity leave can temporarily facilitate a less gendered division of household labor, little research has been able to determine whether these effects persist after the leave period ends or whether the household reverts to traditional gender roles afterward. This paper presents the first causal evidence that exposure to paternity leave can have a large and lasting impact on household sex specialization. I exploit exogenous variation in exposure to a 'daddy quota' for parental leave across Canadian provinces and years, and use time-diary data to analyze whether it was associated with changes in fathers and mothers' time allocations in the long term. I find strong evidence of reduced specialization in exposed households: exposed fathers spend considerably more time in non-market care work after the reform. At the same time, exposed mothers spend considerably more time in paid work and are also more likely to be employed and full-time workers.

Total work time in Spain: evidence from time diary data

Using detailed time-use data from 2002–03 and 2009–10 for Spain, we analyse changes in the time-allocation decisions of the Spanish population, with a focus on the time devoted to total work. Consistent with prior literature, we document that the concept of ‘iso-work’ (e.g. the time devoted to total work by gender is equal) does not hold in societies with stringent gender roles, such as Spain. Women devote more time to total work than men, and this difference has increased throughout the period studied by 2 hours per week. The relative increase in total work for women compared to men can be explained by a relative increase in market work of 8 hours per week, coupled with a relative decrease in nonmarket work of 6 hours per week, which have led Spanish women to devote, relatively, 2 fewer hours to leisure per week in 2009–10, compared to 2002–03. We propose social norms as a potential explanation of these empirical findings. By uncovering how individuals allocate their time inside and outside the market over a period of time, our results may improve our understanding of the dynamics of economic change and welfare.

On the importance of time diary data and introduction to a special issue on time use research

Economists are interested in how people behave under scarcity, and the most obvious scarce resource in the economy is time. Becker (1965) provided the framework for analyzing time allocation decisions, but other than some pioneering exceptions (such as Juster and Stafford 1985; Kooreman and Kapteyn 1987; Biddle and Hamermesh 1990) economists have only recently started to incorporate time outside the market in economic theory (see Hamermesh and Pfann (2005) for a review). Articles in this special issue on time use illustrate how time diary data can offer an ideal instrument not only to measure patterns of time allocation, but also to generate further understanding of economic decision-making processes. The opening paper brings together the two overarching topics in this issue: gender and the under-researched topic of children’s time use. ‘‘Household structure and housework: Assessing the contributions of all household members, with a focus on children and youths’’ by Jonathan Gershuny and Oriel Sullivan uses the UK Office of National Statistics Time Use Survey of 2000/1 to quantify the contributions to housework of all members of households—not just the adult members—accounting for heterogeneity across household types by taking into consideration the different roles of individuals within different household types. For example, the authors show that adolescent daughters do more housework than adolescent sons, and also that daughters aged under 12 behave differently depending on whether they are in a household including older children or not (doing more housework when they are). Taking these interactions into consideration can substantially improve the model’s fitness relative to a model ignoring the different roles of individuals in different household types. This descriptive exercise further supports the previous findings that the couple’s division of labor cannot give a true picture of the distribution of housework and child care within the home so long as a

Fathers' Child Care Involvement and Children's Age in Spain: A Time Use Study on Differences by Education and Mothers' Employment

Using time-diary data from the ‘2003 Spanish Time Use Survey’ (N = 2,941), I analysed two critical questions related to child development and gender equity. First, how do fathers of different levels of education adjust their parenting activities to their children’s developmental needs? Second, how does the mother’s employment affect paternal engagement associated with distinct time demands and gendered practices? The main contribution of the study is the empirical focus on three different subsamples of married fathers with children in distinct age categories, a proxy of children’s developmental needs, and households’ child care demands. There were three main empirical results of the study: (i) In couples with children aged 0-5 years, the father’s education had a significant positive effect on his physical care (i.e. feeding, bathing, and watching over), when these activities are determinant for children’s future well-being; (ii) In couples where the youngest child was aged 3-5 years, a developmental stage in which cognitive development critically depends on parents’ intellectual stimulation, education was significantly correlated with father’s interactive care, especially in teaching activities; (iii) Mother’s employment had a strong positive effect on fathers’ physical care in families with children under school age, when these activities are central for gender equality in the home.

Is Spousal Caregiving Associated With Enhanced Well-Being? New Evidence From the Panel Study of Income Dynamics

We explore whether spousal caregiving is associated with enhanced well-being for older husbands and wives. We use time diary data from the 2009 Panel Study of Income Dynamics and Disability and Use of Time supplement. We measure experienced well-being as ratings of happiness and frustration during activities recalled for the previous day. We estimate separately for husbands and wives 3 distinct effects on experienced well-being: having a spouse with a disability; doing household or personal care tasks ("chores") for someone other than a spouse with a disability; and doing such tasks for a spouse with a disability ("care"). For husbands, neither care status nor spouse's disability status are associated with experienced well-being. In contrast, for wives, carrying out chores is associated with lower reports of happiness compared with other activities and providing care to one's husband is associated with greater reports of happiness than carrying out chores. For women, chores such as meal preparation, laundry, and cleaning--but not caregiving per se--are associated with worse experienced well-being than other activities. Findings underscore that there are positive aspects of spousal caregiving for older wives that offset the innately unpleasant nature of household tasks.

Does High School Homework Increase Academic Achievement?

Although previous research has shown that homework improves students' academic achievement, the majority of these studies use data on students' homework time from retrospective questionnaires, which are less accurate than time-diary data. However, most time-diary data sets do not contain outcome measures, and thus are limited in the questions they can answer. One data set that does have both time-diary and outcome information is the combined Child Development Supplement (CDS) and the Transition to Adulthood Survey (TA) of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. Students complete time diaries as part of the CDS and then a few years later provide information on outcomes in the TA. The CDS provides us with time diaries for both weekdays and weekend days, providing a good picture of homework over the course of a week rather than on just a single day. For high school graduates, we explore the effects of time spent on homework on two measures of academic achievement: high school GPA and college attendance by age 20. We find that homework time increases the probability of college attendance for boys. In addition, when we look at homework performed as a sole activity, we find that homework increases high school GPA for boys.

English

One of the notable innovations in social-science methodology developed during the 1960s was Multi- Dimensional Scaling (MDS). MDS made it possible for social scientists to discover, uncover or model the under- lying spatial structure of relations between various social collectives (like countries or communities), social objects (like music or artifacts) or social attitudes. One early application of MDS described the dimensional contours of Americans’ views of other countries in terms of “perceptual maps of the world”. More recently, it has been used to map country differences in the World Values Survey. Spurred by its initial successful applica- tions, MDS was extended to time-diary data collected in the pioneering 1965 Multinational Time-Budget Study, in which it again provided insightful portrayals of daily activity across the 15 national settings in that study. This present article updates and extends these results by applying MDS methods to the most recent diary collection in the Oxford University MTUS data archive – covering more than 20 (mainly European) countries. Once again, the result was plausible (but somewhat different) configurations again emerged from MDS visualizations. Moreover, these mappings were compatible with conclusions from the 1965 mapping and with earlier more conventional analyses.

The impact of work and family responsibilities on healthy sleep habits

Healthy sleep habits include sufficient sleep, regular bedtimes and established sleep routines. The responsibilities of paid and unpaid work that arise during the daytime are assumed to haunt us at night as well, eventually affecting these sleep habits. A long-term comparison of sleep duration from 1966 and 1999 time-diary data shows that sleep duration has not declined to the large extent that is generally assumed. Moreover, analyses of timing of sleep and sleep routines using time-diary data from 1999 and 2004 also do not show much evidence of this assumed decline. On the contrary, increasing work and family responsibilities positively affect regular bedtimes and sleep routines.

Work Schedules and Community Ties

Little is known about how work schedules affect social connectedness beyond family relationships. The authors use detailed time diary data from 12,140 respondents in the 2008 through 2010 American Time Use Surveys to examine how work schedules affect six forms of community involvement. Results show that night and evening shift work reduces community involvement, but only on weekdays. Daytime shifts reduce community involvement when they are very short, when they involve working from 8 to 5 instead of from 7 to 4, and when they are on weekends. These results call into question tacit assumptions about how shift work affects workers’ social lives.

Re-Traditionalisation of Gender Relations in the 1990s? The Impact of Parenthood on Gendered Time Use in Three Scandinavian Countries

This study investigates the impact of parenthood on gendered time use in Scandinavia. Having (young) children at home generally intensifies gendered patterns in time use, and strengthens the traditional household division of labour, whereby women perform more child care and housework than men. In Sweden during the 1990s, this pattern changed and parenthood affected men's and women's time use in a more similar way by the end of that decade. The article considers whether this was a unique Swedish phenomenon, and whether developments regarding time use were connected more to economic crisis or to societal changes towards gender equality. Using six waves of time diary data from the Multinational Time Use Survey (MTUS), we perform multivariate Tobit regressions, comparing what happened in Sweden during the 1990s to developments in Norway and Finland during the same period. Our results indicate that in all three countries, parenthood around the year 2000 affected men and women in a more similar way than before. Gendered patterns of time use in housework and child care showed a less traditional, gender converging pattern. These developments are associated with underlying societal changes towards greater gender equality, despite the economic crisis experienced in these countries.

Switching Dynamics and the Stress Process.

This paper shows how maintaining social relationships can be a daily hassle that has implications for the stress process, depending on how often individuals transition, or "switch," between their various social roles and social settings throughout the day. I use nationally representative time diary data on 7,662 respondents from the 2010 American Time Use Survey to measure individual rates of this switching behavior and to examine how this relates to perceived stress. Regression analysis shows that, net of how many social roles they play and settings they visit on a given day, individuals who switch more frequently between these elements report higher levels of stress. This finding holds for women but not men, suggesting that switching dynamics are disproportionately stressful for women. I close by discussing the implications of the findings for research on gender and health.

Durations and Domains of Daily Aerobic Activity: Evidence From the 2010 Canadian Time-Use Survey

This study employs national time-diary data to evaluate how much aerobic activity Canadians engage in on a daily basis, how that activity is apportioned by activity domain, and how subgroups within the population vary in their aerobic attainment. The study employs time-use data from the 2010 General Social Survey of Canada, for 15,390 respondents aged 15 and older. To estimate effort levels, the authors harmonized survey codes with those in the Compendium of Physical Activities. Aerobic activity was defined as moderate or vigorous effort at 3.5 Metabolic Equivalent of Task (MET) or higher. Among the 4 activity domains, aerobic participation is highest in leisure activities, followed by chores, paid work, and active transportation (AT). Only a minority (42%) of respondents recorded at least 20 mins/day of aerobic activity. Aerobic totals were particularly low for women and those in poor or fair health, and low for students, 15- to 24-year-olds, and those residing in Quebec, Ontario, and larger cities. The majority of Canadian adults are failing to meet recommended aerobic activity levels. However, there is considerable opportunity to increase aerobic participation for some groups, particularly women and young adults, especially in the leisure and AT domains.

Family Flexibility and Children’s Time Involvement with Parents

This study uses time diary data from the Child Development Supplement of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to examine patterns in young school-age (6-12 years) children’s time involvement with parents in nontraditional families versus first married biological parent families. Our results reveal that: (a) children’s involvement levels with mothers do not vary by family type but (b) children’s involvement levels with stepfathers (in either first marriages or remarriages) are lower than their involvement levels with biological fathers in first marriages. Among remarried stepfather families, children’s lower levels of involvement with fathers are explained by mothers’ disapproval of informal unions.

Active Living Among Older Canadians: A Time-Use Perspective Over 3 Decades

This research uses four nationally representative samples of time diary data, spanning almost 30 yr, that are fused with energy expenditure information to enumerate the median daily duration of moderate or vigorous effort activity, quantify the prevalence of Canadians age 65 yr and older who are meeting recommended daily levels of physical activity, and explore the factors affecting rates of active living. Results indicate that 41.1% of older Canadians met recommended levels of physical activity in 1992, 40.6% in 1998, 43.5% in 2005, and 39.6% in 2010. Both rates of active living and daily duration of aerobic activity exhibit significant differences among sociodemographic groups, with age, sex, activity limitation, urban-rural, and season exhibiting the most significant influences. This study illustrates the potential for time diary data to provide detailed surveillance of physical activity patterns, active aging research, and program development, as well.

Investigating Travel Thresholds for Sports and Recreation Activities

Central to the practice of urban planning is the provision of services, which has potential public health and social welfare implications. However, service area analysis, typically, employs arbitrary travel-distance thresholds. Through this study we provide an empirical investigation into the durations and distances that respondents are willing to travel in order to engage in various sports and recreation activities. This research uses time-diary data, augmented with global positioning system information, to investigate individually based and objectively measured travel thresholds (which define travelsheds) for various sports and recreation activities in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Results accord with national time-diary data, and indicate that duration-based and distance-based travelsheds are generally in the order of 15–30 minutes and 4–20 km, respectively. Georeferenced time-diary data provide unique insights into travel thresholds, which may be used to help improve accessibility and thereby increase the frequency and duration of physical activity engagement.