Social Trust,Social Partner Time and Television Time

Social trust is an important phenomenon, but the influence of important time-based measures upon trust has not been examined. Such measures include social contact and anti-social activity, such as television watching, which allows for the co-presence of other people. This paper reports on associations between trust and weighted means of co-present ‘social’ time (defined as time spent in various ‘social’ activities) and co-present time spent watching television, using the Australian Time Use Survey, 2006. It finds that trust is associated with social time spent in the co-presence of ‘strangers’ predominately from outside the household, and that TV watching in the co-presence of ‘familiars’—friends and family—is negatively associated with trust.     

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.

     

Measuring Information Behavior: A Time Budget Survey in Japan

This paper discusses the results of a time budget survey which was conducted nationwide in Japan in 1995 on ‘information behavior’, that is, the amount of time people spent communicating and using information media ranging from conversations to computers. We propose a three-dimensional time budget survey as a method for measuring information behavior in actual life. The method classifies information behavior into 24 categories and measures them with respect to three factors, i.e. time, location and purpose of behavior. Our survey revealed that the total time spent on information behavior was about seven hours per day, of which about 45% was spent watching TV. The displacement effect of PC use on TV watching was estimated by a “time-shift matching” design. The results demonstrated that use of a PC does not significantly affect TV viewing, despite a large difference in TV viewing time between PC users and non-users.     

Parental media socialization and educational attainment: Resource or disadvantage?

This article analyzes the long-term effects of parental media socialization on children's educational attainment. Data on 8316 individuals from 3257 families in the Netherlands is used to estimate hierarchical models that distinguish between family-specific (socialization) and individual-level effects. The study reveals that parental reading and television socialization plays a meaningful role in predicting children's success in education. Whereas parental time spent viewing television is disadvantageous for a child's educational career, parental reading intensity enhances educational success. Moreover, not only does media exposure play a relevant role, the content of parental media consumption also matters. Parents who prefer highbrow literature benefit their children's educational career, whereas a preference for watching popular TV programs is disadvantageous for a child's educational success. Next to the parental example of media consumption, media guidance provided by parents is scrutinized. Results indicate that parent-child interactions on reading positively affect children's educational attainment.     

Time Use Patterns Between Maintenance,Subsistence and Leisure Activities: A Case Study in China

The Chinese government conducted its first time use survey of the activities of Chinese individuals in 2008. Activities were classified into three broad types, maintenance activities, subsistence activities and leisure activities. Time use patterns were defined by an individuals’ time spent on maintenance, subsistence and leisure activities each day. We analyzed the time use patterns of different population segments, such as gender, region, age, employment status, and income. Rural residents spend 2 h per day more on SA than urban residents. Five of the employment status categories; migrant workers, full-time students, retirees, the unemployed, and Home-makers, each have unique time schedules. Moreover, time use patterns vary greatly between the different age groups and different income levels. The relationships between the time spent on maintenance, subsistence, and leisure activities were analyzed. Time spent on subsistence activities each day were negatively correlated with time spent on maintenance and leisure activities. The time spent on maintenance activities was positively correlated with the time spent on leisure activities. The ratio of time spent on maintenance, subsistence and leisure activities in China is compared with that in Japan, America and New Zealand. A new term, Time Structure, was coined to describe the ratio of individual time spent on maintenance, subsistence and leisure activities. The time structure in China is 60:24:16 and differs from the structures found in the other countries examined.     

Fathers�� time investments in children: do sons get more?

This paper uses the 2003 American Time Use Survey to examine the effects of child gender on paternal time with children in married two-parent families. The results show that fathers of boys invest more time in children than those with only daughters and reduce their leisure time without children to do so. Boys get more of this time than girls in all-girl families and compared to their own sisters. Girls with brothers receive more of fathers’ time than girls with only sisters, but this is primarily in television watching, so whether this advantages them is open to question.     

Large Differences in Time Use for Three Data Collection Systems

Two versions of an electronic time use diary are compared with the conventional paper-and-pencil one (or PAPI). One version was a self-administered diary (Computer-Assisted Self-Interview or CASI), while the second was based on an interviewer-administered procedure (Computer-Assisted Telephone Interview or CATI). Comparison of the data collection systems used for time use statistics revealed large differences between the procedures for most of the activities. Many of these differences were significant at the 0.05 level. Since no general effect of the registration method was found, several activities have been studied in detail to account for the differences in time use. We pay attention here only to the results for two specific activities; time spent on travel and watching television/listening to the radio. For both activities, specific registration characteristics were responsible for the differences found.     

What Do Happy People Do?

Little attention in the quality-of-life literature has been paid to data on the daily activity patterns of happy and less happy people. Using ratings-scale information from time-diary studies, this article examines the hypothesis that people who describe themselves as happier engage in certain activities more than those who describe themselves as less happy. Based on 34 years of data collected by the General Social Survey (GSS) on social activities and media usage, it is found that people who are happy report being more active in most social activities, in religion and in newspaper reading. On the other hand, happier people report less time watching television, a relation that holds after control for education, marital status and other predictors of happiness. The need to replicate these findings using panel data is highlighted.     

Development of the Contentment with Life Assessment Scale (CLAS): Using Daily Life Experiences to Verify Levels of Self-Reported Life Satisfaction

On average, Anglo-Americans report that they are satisfied with their lives, but their global evaluations tend to deviate from their daily experiences (e.g., Oishi [2002, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 28(10), 1398–1406]). We explored the hypothesis that the average life satisfaction of Anglo-Americans is better characterized as neutral than satisfied. In Study 1 we developed the five-item Contentment with Life Assessment Scale (CLAS), which focuses on contentment, fulfillment and self-discrepancies. Normative data based on three general population samples demonstrated that the CLAS produces a close to normal distribution of scores, has excellent reliability, and is sensitive to differences in life conditions (e.g., income, marital status). In two daily diary studies we tested whether global life satisfaction measures corresponded to people’s daily subjective well-being. The CLAS was the best predictor among three self-report life satisfaction measures of daily escapist behaviors including television watching and alcohol consumption, and daily stress-related physical symptoms (Study 2). In Study 3, participants recorded their level of life satisfaction daily for two weeks. Average daily life satisfaction scores clustered close to the neutral rather than satisfied point of the measurement scale.     

Unhealthy Weight in Indian Families: The Role of the Family Environment in the Context of the Nutrition Transition

India faces a dual burden of increasing obesity and persistent underweight as it experiences the nutrition transition—the dietary and lifestyle changes that accompany globalization, economic development, and technological change. Yet, the nutrition transition is not solely a top-down process; rather, global forces converge with local practices at multiple levels of the social ecology. The family environment, a key site for the transmission of local customs and norms, remains largely unexplored in India. We examined the extent to which opposite-gender siblings and mother–child pairs were concordant or discordant in body weight, and whether domains of the family environment, specifically, food practices, food-related gender norms, and household resources, were associated with patterns of unhealthy weight within and between families. Multilevel dyadic analysis and logistic regression were conducted using survey data from a representative sample of 400 families in a Southern Indian city. We identified substantial clustering of weight among opposite-gender sibling pairs (ICC = 0.43) and mother–child pairs, as well as important patterns of discordance, including 11% of families experiencing a dual burden of underweight and overweight. Household resources, including mother’s education and income, were salient in explaining the distribution of body weight within and between families. Importantly, less examined domains of the family environment were also relevant, including food practices (e.g., grocery shopping frequency), and food-related gender norms (e.g., mother’s control of food served at home). Continued exploration of how global and local practices converge in households will be necessary to develop programming that effectively addresses India’s dual burden of unhealthy weight.     

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.     

It is Hard to Swim Upstream: Dietary Acculturation Among Mexican-Origin Children

Health and immigration researchers often implicate dietary acculturation in explanations of Mexican children of immigrants’ weight gain after moving to the U.S., but rarely explore how diet is shaped by immigrants’ structural incorporation. We used data from the 1999/00-2009/10 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey to assess how indicators of Mexican-origin children’s acculturation and structural incorporation influence two outcomes: how healthy and how “Americanized” children’s diets are. Indicators of acculturation were strongly associated with more Americanized and less healthy diets. However, structural incorporation indicators were mostly unrelated to diet outcomes net of acculturation. An exception was that parental education was positively associated with consuming a healthy diet. Finally, children of natives consumed more Americanized, unhealthy diets than children of immigrants and these differences were largely explained by differences in the acculturation. Children of natives would have consumed an even less healthy diet were it not for their higher levels of parental education. Overall, the results suggest that the process of adapting to the U.S. life style is associated with the loss of cultural culinary preferences and less healthy eating behaviors despite improvements in socioeconomic status.     

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.     

Children Living Without Their Fathers: Population Estimates and Indicators of Educational Well-being

This paper estimates the number of American children in grades K–12 who live without their biological fathers and examines the association of absent-father status with children’s well-being. The 2003 Parent and Family Involvement in Education Survey of the National Household Education Surveys Program (n = 12,426) shows that 28% percent of White students, 39% of Hispanic students, 69% of Black students, and 36% overall live without their fathers. In bivariate comparisons, absent-father status is associated with reduced well-being: worse health, lower academic achievement, worse educational experiences, and less parental involvement in school activities. When socio-economic factors are controlled, father-absence is associated with small deficits of well-being. The findings suggest that the conventional wisdom may exaggerate the detrimental effects of father absence.     

Television viewing and early initiation of sexual intercourse: is there a link?

Using data from the National Survey of Children, this paper examines the hypothesis that the amount of time children spend viewing television and the extent to which the content viewed is sexual in nature is related to the initiation of sexual activity. Several theories that would lead to this hypothesis are reviewed. The data do not provide any strong or consistent evidence for such links. However, some aspects of the context in which television is viewed are related to sexual activity. The authors suggest ways in which the design and measures could be strengthened to provide a more rigorous test of the hypothesis.     

中国老年人不健康寿命变动的分状态贡献率研究

结合2005年1％人口抽样调查数据与全国2010年人口普查数据，运用Sullivan法，研究老年人不健康寿命变动的分状态贡献率。结果表明：60—97岁老年人的不健康阶段主为不健康但生活能自理状态，而97岁以上老年人的不健康阶段主为生活不能自理状态；与2005年相比。老年人不健康寿命及比重均变小，符合”疾病压缩理论”，但分状态寿命的变动趋势存在显著差异；生活不能自理状态对不健康寿命缩短的贡献率大于不健康但生活能自理状态。因此，老年个体不仅整体健康状况改善．健康结构也在不断优化：这意味着老年个体对照护资源需求量及需求种类均发生变化。     

Parental Socioeconomic Background and Child Behaviour

Although childhood obesity has long been in focus, little is known about the sensitivity of behavioural choices to measure parental resource constraints. The aim of this study is to examine the heterogeneous effects of children’s (or their parents’) choices of lifestyle subject to information and resource constraints, respectively. We address this issue using a unique longitudinal data set of almost 1,500 schoolchildren attending state schools between 2008 and 2010 in the Danish Municipality of Aalborg. One empirical strategy is to control for a rich set of child and parental characteristics; another is to use child fixed effect to control for fixed unobserved child characteristics. By including the interaction between child behaviour and parental socioeconomic background, a more complete but more complex picture arises. Our findings challenge the predominant assumption that behaviour and weight is a choice made by children, or their parents.     

Obesity, disease, and functional limitation in later life

Little is known about the effects of obesity late in life. Using data from the Longitudinal Study of Aging and the Assets and Health Dynamics of the Oldest Old Survey, this study finds an increased prevalence of obesity, over time, among those 70 and older. Obesity is related most strongly to limitations in activities of daily living (ADLs) for women and to activities related to mobility. One ADL, eating, has a negative association to obesity. Obesity is associated with an increased prevalence of arthritis, diabetes, and hypertension. These results are cross-sectional and are based on self-reports of height and weight; they must be interpreted cautiously.     

Decomposing Trends in Child Obesity

We unravel the absolute level and relative prominence of two demographic processes that are relevant for childhood obesity, and that will ultimately determine the long-term course and pace of change in child obesity rates. We leverage data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey to decompose change in child obesity from 1971 to 2012. We partition change into that attributable to (1) healthier, more nutritionally and economically advantaged cohorts in the population being replaced by cohorts of children who are less advantaged (between-cohort change), and (2) the health habits, nutrition, and social and economic circumstances of all cohorts of children worsening over time (within-cohort change). The rise in obesity among children aged 2 to 19 years is solely due to intracohort change driven by variation in food security composition and in the diet of the population over time. Child obesity in the population rose largely because of individual increases in weight status that are broadly distributed across age and cohort groups. Smaller but significant cohort replacement effects slightly attenuated these intracohort change effects over the study period, leading to a more gradual increase in obesity. Our results provide some reasons for optimism. Given that population estimates of child obesity rose because the typical member of all cohorts became heavier over time at all stages of the early life course, successful policy and health interventions that focus on changing health habits across all ages and generations have the potential to quickly slow or reverse the upward trend in child obesity.