Time use and leisure: Subjective and objective aspects

This paper utilizes data from the 1981 Canadian Time Use Pilot Study and from a small Halifax time-budget study to look at subjective and contextual dimensions of leisure for women and men. The Canadian study (n=2685) had information on the time spent in daily activities as well as on the settings and social contexts of those activities. The Halifax study included similar time-budget information on 60 married couples, but also incorporated subjective ratings of all diary events in terms of perceived work or leisure. Using subjective weightings from the Halifax study, estimates of subjective leisure were made for different categories of daily activity and for different Canadian population subgroups. Hypercodes were used to look at the effect of social roles on leisure time, and the AID procedure was used to analyze the contextual dimensions of leisure for men and women. The results show that objective activity and well as subjective leisure vary by population subgroup. Constraints to leisure include being female, being employed, having children, and, to some degree, being married. Of the contextual dimensions, subjective leisure was shown to be influenced primarily by type of objective activity. Location, time of day and day of the week also influenced leisure designations, but to a lesser extent. This study suggests the potential usefulness of subjective weightings of activities in order to gain a greater understanding of leisure patterns and participation.     

Welfare Participation and Time Use in China

Using the newly available China Family Panel Studies 2010 survey data and a propensity score matching method, this study examines the possible influence of participation in China’s primary welfare program, Dibao, on household head’s time use pattern in both urban and rural areas. We find that Dibao lowered recipients’ time spent on various leisure and social activities and increased their time spent on unspecified activities or being idle for both urban and rural residents. Urban Dibao recipients also tended to spend less time on education activities, while rural Dibao recipients spent less time on work activities but more time on personal care and household activities. These findings provide pioneering evidence on the possible link between welfare participation and time use patterns in the global welfare literature. As Dibao continues to expand, the empirical evidence from this article suggests that Dibao might have some unintended adverse effects on recipients, including less time spent on leisure and social activities, reduced time on work and education activities, and more time on being idle. Future reforms of Dibao and its supplementary policies and programs need to consider how best to promote both the economic and holistic well-being of the participants.

     

Are the Real Time Costs of Children Equally Shared by Mothers and Fathers?

This article attempts to estimate the time cost of children in France for couples who do not forgo any income, on the basis of the INSEE 1998–1999 time use survey. Having a child involves an increase in domestic work and/or the dedication of occupational income to pay for childcare. The reduction in “time for oneself”—leisure and personal care, i.e. 24 h less working hours paid or unpaid—is modelled for a dual-earner couple in full-time employment who do not use childcare services to increase his/her leisure time. Taking a couple in full-time employment avoids income endogeneity bias, since income is reduced by career interruption and part-time employment. These estimates account for this selection by full-time paid work. The article shows that time cost is roughly 1 h 30 min a day for a child aged 3–14, and is 4 h a day for each younger child. As this cost rises, the more fathers sacrifice some of their free time. The father and mother of two young children with a childminder thus each have only 11 hours of free time (including sleep) per day. The time cost of a large family (3 children) is equivalent to a full-time job on the labour market. In France, work-life balance policies and family pension entitlements only cover a small part of this cost.     

Disconnected Lives: Trends in Time Spent Alone in Finland

Discussions about social isolation have been extensive over the past few decades. A less sociable nature of social ties has been identified in Western societies. The phenomenon has been associated with demographic changes such as aging and living alone as well as changes in the use of new technologies. In this study we employ representative Finnish Time Use Surveys from three decades, 1987–1988 (n?=?1887), 1999–2000 (n?=?2673) and 2009–2010 (n?=?1887) to examine the trends in social isolation, measured as time spent alone. Our results showed that between 1987 and 2010 the time spent alone increased by 124 min per day. The increase was linear and occurred in nearly all population groups. Structural factors, such as aging and an increase in the number of single households, are strongly associated with increased time spent alone. Time spent alone has increased, especially during leisure activities. Specifically, time spent watching television and using computers is associated with the decreasing tendency for face-to-face interaction.

     

Patterns of Time Use Across the Life Span in Korea: A Latent Class Analysis and Age and Gender Differences

The purpose of this study was to gain an understanding of time use and the patterns of time use across the life span using a socioemotional selectivity theory. The data used for this study were from the “Korean Time Use Survey,” which is collected every 5 years by Statistics Korea (KOSTAT). The data collected in 1999, 2004, and 2009 were used to analyze the patterns of time use using latent class analyses and to observe the differences of time use by age and gender. The results were summarized as follows: Based on the analyses of nine behavior classifications, after sleep and personal care, Korean allocated more time in daily activities to relationship and leisure time, followed by education, paid work, and household management, with the order differing between each age group and gender. Three different classes of time use were classified at each age group. Education-centered time use was revealed to be mainly in the young, paid work-centered in the middle-aged, and relationship and leisure-centered in older adults. We find significant gender differences. Men’s patterns of time did not change markedly across the 3 years, while women’s patterns have shifted. Meanwhile, in the age 65 and older group, paid work appeared alongside as well as leisure among most prominent activities, were appeared as dominant forms of time use. This phenomenon is closely related to reflecting high rates of elderly poverty in Korea. Further discussions concerning the time use by age and gender were provided and countermeasures for changing time use in later life were discussed.     

Attitudes toward items of time budgets as predictors of time uses: The case of men-v-women

This study explores the impact of attitudes that men-v-women hold toward work and leisure activities on time spent on these activities in order to determine whether which sex shows a higher level of relationship. An empirical data survey using mail questionnaires was undertaken in Montréal and in Toronto with five socio-economic strata. Results show that women's attitudes are better predictors of time spent on leisure than men's attitudes, that women's time spent at work and home chore is higher than men's counterpart and that gender explain significantly more variance in time spent at work and on leisure than attitudes. In order to assess the sole effects of gender, the variance attributable to other socio-demographic variables (age, culture, education, profession and income) was cancelled through regressions on these variables and further statistics of the residuals of these regressions. It is concluded that the deterministic view that exogenous variables explain time budgets is more adequate than the voluntaristic views; that women work more and attribute more value to leisure than men.     

Australians' changing use of time, 1974–1987

This paper examines various scenarios of social change in industrialised societies. Amongst the ideas considered are: the post-industrial society thesis; reduction of (paid) work time; the leisure revolution; the self-provisioning of services; and the growth of the “symmetrical family”. These propositions are tested by comparing data gathered in the 1974 Cities Commission study of time use in Melbourne (N=717) with data collected by the Australian Bureau of Statistics Pilot Study of Time Use conducted in Sydney, 1987 (N=1611). Analysis of time spent on leisure, paid and unpaid work. The results of this analysis indicate a significant modification of the ideas about the probable future of industrial societies is needed.     

Exercise,Eating Patterns,and Obesity: Evidence from the ATUS and Its Eating &; Health Module

Time spent eating and exercising can impact quality of life measures such as general health and risk for obesity. This article links data from the American Time Use Study and the Eating and Health Module to explore exercise and eating patterns for varying age groups, over different times of day, and by self-reported health status. Younger Americans who did some exercise were more likely to engage in higher impact sports. Older Americans who exercised were more likely to do so in the morning. Americans who reported being in excellent health spent more time exercising than other self-reported health groups, regardless of their sex or age.     

Leisure Inequality in the United States: 1965–2003

This article exploits the complex sequential structure of the diary data in the American Heritage Time Use Study (AHTUS) and constructs three classes of indicators that capture the quality of leisure (pure leisure, co-present leisure, and leisure fragmentation) to show that the relative growth in leisure time enjoyed by low-educated individuals documented in previous studies has been accompanied by a relative decrease in the quality of that leisure time. These results are not driven by any single leisure activity, such as time spent watching television. Our findings may offer a more comprehensive picture of inequality in the United States and provide a basis for weighing the relative decline in earnings and consumption for the less-educated against the simultaneous relative growth of leisure.     

Intimate Partner Violence and Women’s Economic and Non-Economic Activities in Minya,Egypt

Intimate partner violence (IPV) against women is widespread, but its implications for their economic and non-economic activities are understudied. Leveraging new data from 564 ever-married women aged 22–65 in rural Minya, Egypt, we estimated logistic regressions and zero-inflated negative binomial regressions to test spillover, compensation, and patriarchal bargaining theories about the influences of women’s exposure to IPV on their engagement in and time spent on market, subsistence, domestic, and care work. Supporting compensation theory, exposures to lifetime, recent, and chronic physical or sexual IPV were associated with higher adjusted odds of performing market work in the prior month, and exposures to recent and chronic IPV were associated with higher adjusted odds of performing subsistence work in this period. Supporting compensation and patriarchal bargaining theories, exposures to recent and chronic IPV were associated with more time spent on domestic work in the prior day. Supporting spillover and patriarchal bargaining theories, exposures to lifetime IPV of all forms were associated with lower adjusted odds of performing mostly nonspousal care work in the prior day, and this association was partially mediated by women’s generalized anxiety. Women in rural Minya who are exposed to IPV may escalate their housework to fulfill local norms of feminine domesticity while substituting economic activities for nonspousal care work to enhance their economic independence from violent partners.     

Leisure before and after parenthood

The leisure time of 117 wives and husbands was studied to determine the effect of parenthood on this time allocation. Data from both a weekday and a weekend day, both before and after the birth of the first child were analyzed. Ordinary least squares regression was used to analyze the time use model which controlled for weekend/weekday, and looked at the effects of personal characteristics such as wife's education and employment status, husband's wage rate, and number of years married as well as parental status. The time of the wife and the husband and the ratio of the wife's to husband's time were negatively related to parental status. Each personal characteristic was negatively related to the wife/husband ratio of leisure time and unrelated to husband's leisure.     

Marital Status and Mothers’ Time Use: Childcare,Housework, Leisure,and Sleep

Assumptions that single mothers are “time poor” compared with married mothers are ubiquitous. We tested theorized associations derived from the time poverty thesis and the gender perspective using the 2003–2012 American Time Use Surveys (ATUS). We found marital status differentiated housework, leisure, and sleep time, but did not influence the amount of time that mothers provided childcare. Net of the number of employment hours, married mothers did more housework and slept less than never-married and divorced mothers, counter to expectations of the time poverty thesis. Never-married and cohabiting mothers reported more total and more sedentary leisure time than married mothers. We assessed the influence of demographic differences among mothers to account for variation in their time use by marital status. Compositional differences explained more than two-thirds of the variance in sedentary leisure time between married and never-married mothers, but only one-third of the variance between married and cohabiting mothers. The larger unexplained gap in leisure quality between cohabiting and married mothers is consistent with the gender perspective.     

Parental time and working schedules

This paper investigates the effects of working schedules and of other characteristics (including family composition) on the time devoted by mothers and fathers to different activities with children in Canadian households, by using 1992 and 1998 Canadian Time Use Surveys. Switching regression models and models with selection allow us to simultaneously model labour market participation, type of work schedules and allocation of parental time. Working time has a negative and very significant effect on parental time. Hours worked during the day or at night exert a similar effect on parental time, but the impact of hours worked in the evening is by far larger. Time worked in the evening mainly decreases leisure and social activities with children.

Relative Income,Race, and Fertility

If a white husband's income is higher than expected for men of his age, race, education, job characteristics, and region, economic theory predicts higher complete fertility for his wife. In the present study one per cent public use samples from the 1970 Census for California and Hawaii were used to examine the effect of relative income on Japanese, Chinese, and black fertility. Relative income was defined in two ways: (1) with regard to earnings of husbands of the same race, education, employment, and state; (2) with regard to earnings of white husbands of the same education, employment, and state. High relative incomes defined in each way were associated with increased completed fertility of Japanese and Chinese in Hawaii, where Orientals form a majority. Neither definition of high relative income was associated with the completed fertility of Japanese, Chinese, or blacks in California, where non-whites form a minority. The results suggest that the effect of relative income on fertility for a racial group will be positive only where there are few racial barriers to their attainment of high incomes.     

Time Cost of Children as Parents' Foregone Leisure

From the 1998–99 French Insee time use survey, the time cost of children is estimated in terms of hours of foregone leisure. The focus on couples with two spouses working full time implies no need to be concerned about substitution between home production and labor supply. The model accounts for selection into full-time employment, endogenous wages, and controls for outside help with home production and child care. The foregone leisure cost per child under the age of 3 is 1.6 hours for each parent. It is about half that size for children aged 3 to 14. Children over age 14 involve no leisure cost to parents.     

Pictorial Approaches for Measuring Time Use in Rural Ethiopia

Time use researchers working in least developed countries (LDCs) face difficulties collecting data from illiterate populations who may conceptualize time differently than those in industrialized countries. We identify existing gaps in time use data collection methods and discuss two novel, pictorial methods to collect time use data from these populations. The first method is a modified recall interview modeled on participatory rural appraisal (PRA) methods that asks respondents to place macaroni on pictures of activity categories in proportion to the amount of time spent on that activity during the previous day. The second is a simplified pictorial time diary that uses a timer and sequentially-numbered stickers to re-create the temporal order of activities in 30-min increments. The latter method also avoids recall bias problems. We present time use data collected in 2009 using these methods in a study examining the impacts of water infrastructure on women and children’s time use in rural Ethiopia. In total, we collected information using the first method from 263 household members over age 10, including 167 water collectors, and pilot-tested the pictorial diary approach with 10 adult respondents.     

Estimation of Joint Income-Wealth Poverty: A Sensitivity Analysis

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.     

The Effects of the Informal Sector on Income of the Poor in Russia

This paper clarifies the social and economic effects of employment in the informal sector on the poor in Russia in recent years. The article describes the extent to which the figures for informal sector at large and unofficial employment in particular vary in different estimates and the effect they have on the average labor income of the poor. The major impact of the research consists of the development of a universal method for the estimation of the scales of labor income of the poor in the informal sector. Using the latest available data from Russian Federal State Statistics Service, this indicator is calculated for the poor and than compared with average wages in the formal sector and the subsistence minimum (official poverty line). The study concludes that the informal sector is a factor of social stability in a postsocialist transition economy, which, however, cannot alleviate poverty.     

The Impact of Having a Baby on the Level and Content of Women’s Well-Being

The primary objective of this study was to more fully understand the impact of having a baby on women’s well-being by attending to both the level and the content of well-being. To cover the judgemental and affective aspects of well-being we included global measures of life satisfaction and well-being and affective experience measures derived from the day reconstruction method. In a sample of 19 first-time mothers no differences between pre and postnatal reports of general life satisfaction, depression, anxiety, and experienced positive and negative affect were found, suggesting that the arrival of the newborn baby does not universally impact on women’s level of well-being. Changes in the content of well-being were studied by examining changes in the way women experience specific activities and interactions with various social partners. There appeared to be an upward shift in experienced positive affect during active leisure and a slight decrease in negative affect during time spent with relatives. The results are discussed in light of previously documented changes across the transition to motherhood in negative mood states, time use, women’s evaluation of various aspects of daily life, and relational satisfaction.     

Predictors of Life Satisfaction among Urban Iranian Women: An Exploratory Analysis

This paper explores life satisfaction among married and unmarried Iranian women in urban areas. Data is analyzed from a sample of 335 women of which 61% are married and 39% are unmarried (i.e., single, divorced, or widows). Data is collected through the use of self-reported questionnaires administered during 1992 and 1994. A series of path analysis and cross tabulations suggest that for married women life satisfaction is directly linked to their satisfaction with marriage, employment, and their leisure experiences. There is an inverse relationship between satisfaction and the women's activity, however. For unmarried women, satisfaction is affected by their leisure experiences and educational level. The study suggests that any effort to reduce or increase the educational, employment, or leisure activities of women will directly affect women's general satisfaction and therefore affect Iranian society as a whole.