Household structure and housework: assessing the contributions of all household members,with a focus on children and youths

Most research into the division of household domestic labor focuses on couple households, treating other household members such as children/youths and other adults as independent variables affecting the domestic work of husbands and wives. We present an integrated analysis of variance/variance decomposition that summarizes the determinants of the housework contributions of, and the housework burden imposed by, all the individuals in four common household types, with a focus on the contributions of older children and youths. We demonstrate the importance of statistical interactions between the contributions of different household members (distinguished by partnership status, gender, and the ages and genders of children/youths), in particular for those households containing children/youths. We conclude that in order to analyze the contributions of all household members jointly, it is necessary to distinguish different household compositions for separate analysis.     

Marie-Claire Blais and Dostoevsky: Observations from the Notebooks

This article demonstrates the pervasive presence of Dostoevsky in the oeuvre of Canadian writer Marie-Claire Blais—three-time winner of the Governor-General’s Award for literature—through analysis of her working notebooks and individual novels. Blais’ thirteen working notebooks (1962–1974) contain one hundred eighty references to works and characters in Russian literature, some sixty of which relate to Dostoevsky. Analysis of these references shows that Blais throughout her formative years studied Dostoevsky rigorously and thoroughly. Using the seven mentions of Alyosha from The Brothers Karamazov as a starting point, we examine Blais’ creation of a series of Alyosha-figures in Un Joualonais sa Joualonie (1973), Visions d’Anna, ou le vertige (1982), and Dans la foudre et la lumière (2001), each representing a possible alternative development of the character-type. The theme of innocent suffering (Ivan Karamazov’s “the single tear of a child”) is traced in David Sterne (1967), Un Joualonais sa Joualonie (1973), and Soifs (1995).     

The enjoyment of activities: Do couples affect each others' well-being?

In this paper I investigate the use of a measure of well-being derived from time-use data on the enjoyment of activities, and explore the association between the well-being of partners. The measure of well-being used is directly derived from the subjective assessment of the enjoyment of activities as recorded in time-use diaries. It is shown that this measure yeilds plausible results which share many of the characteristics of other measures of well-being. In addition, since the diaries used in the analysis were collected from couples it has also been possible to investigate the association between the well-being of partners. It is shown that in multivariate analyses including both time-use and socio-demographic variables the effect of a partner's well-being has by far the most significant impact on individual well-being. It is argued that this combination of information offers a useful means of analysing the relationship between time-use, well-being and the couple relationship. In this sense the analysis cross-cuts some of the conventional disciplinary boundaries which have served to separate the study of emotional relationships and psychological states from that of the daily activities of households.     

Combining qualitative and quantitative data in the longitudinal study of household allocations

The paper examines some of the technical and epistemological questions raised by the debate on linking qualitative and quantitative research methodologies. For illustrative purposes, we discuss a qualitative research project on the distribution of resources within households currently being conducted by the British Household Panel Study at the University of Essex. Initially, we provide a general background to the current research, moving on to examine some of the methodological problems which emerge and the epistemological questions which they raise. These include the general issue of classification; the difficulties of defining the analytical boundaries of households; the particular problems associated with using households as longitudinal units of analysis; and the relationship between actors' accounts and the conceptual categories which we use to describe behaviour. We suggest that the tendency to see qualitative and quantitative methodologies as mutually exclusive and antagonistic paradigms is a misleading representation of the reality of social research practice, and argue for the importance of maintaining a qualitative component in the BHPS in order to understand the complex processes involved in the intra-household distribution of resources.     

Relational resources, gender consciousness and possibilities of change in marital relationships

Investigating the possibilities of change in marital relationships, we argue, involves examining the interplay of gender consciousness, relational resources and material circumstances in their concrete, interactional manifestations. The attempt to address this interface is grounded in the idea that understanding gender relations necessarily involves both institutional and interactional dimensions. While much research has been devoted to the influence of material or structural resources on indicators such as the domestic division of labour, relatively little direct attention has been given to the issue of differing ‘relational’ or interpersonal resources. We use a multi-method approach based on interviews with women in different occupations to analyse possibilities of change in marital communication and the domestic division of labour in relation both to women's material and to their relational resources. We conclude that a combination of increased gender consciousness and the development of particular inter-personal skills facilitates negotiation and change in the boundaries regulating both communication and the domestic division of labour within the marital relationship.     

Domestic outsourcing and multitasking: How much do they really contribute?

The bulk of responsibility for domestic work and childcare in heterosexual couples falls on women. But the means they find to cope with this load, and how these means relate to the factors underpinning the division of labor are not often studied. Two much-cited ways of reducing overall work time are purchasing domestic assistance (outsourcing) and the multitasking of domestic/caring tasks. Using UK 2000/2001 time-use data (N = 4196 couples), we find domestic outsourcing is related to having dependent children and to partners’ resources, but has little impact on the total domestic/caring workload of either partner. Nor can outsourcing account for the reduction in women’s unpaid labor with increasing economic resources. Wives spend more time multitasking than husbands, but their proportion of multitasked domestic time is similar, and is not affected by resources or dependent children. Domestic multitasking seems to be more related to opportunity (time at home) than to time pressure.     

Cross-national changes in time-use: some sociological (hi) stories re-examined

The paper addresses some macro-sociological questions about changes in broad categories of time-use. The focus is on large-scale cross-national time trends from developed countries in paid and unpaid work, and leisure. Reference is made to some well-known sociological and historical accounts of such change, and to the fact that time-use diary data has only relatively recently become available for analysing trends over time. The data used are drawn from a comparative cross-time data archive held by the Institute for Social and Economic Research at Essex University, comprising successive time-use diary surveys from a range of industrialized countries collected from the 1960s to the 1990s. The time use evidence suggests relative stability in the balance between work and leisure time over the period covered by the analyses. Some alternative explanations are advanced for why there seems to be a gap between this evidence and, on the one hand, the burgeoning literature in both academic and popular media addressing the 'time famine' and, on the other, people's professed experience of what is happening to their time.