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Notes
- Russell Sage Foundation
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Notes Chapter 2 1. Beginning in 2003, time diaries are being collected from much larger samples (12,000 to 20,000 per year) on an ongoing basis by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This new collection, known as the American Time Use Survey (ATUS), uses the CPS as its sampling frame. These data first became available as we completed this project. The ATUS collection does not ascertain secondary activities but does provide a rich new source of information on time use in the United States, particularly time spent with children and in voluntary activities. 2. In the studies of Verbrugge and Gruber-Baldine (1993), average estimated weekly times totaled 187 hours, and their list of activities did not include time for churchgoing, shopping for durable goods or professional services, or adult education. In Hawes, Talarzyk, and Blackwell’s (1975) national survey, estimated weekly activities averaged more than 230 hours. Because American culture judges people by what they do, portraying oneself as busy and industrious is often socially desirable. Hence people often construct answers that put them in a positive light. D. R. Chase and Geoffrey Godbey (1983), for instance, asked members of specific swimming and tennis clubs in State College, Pennsylvania, how many times they had used the club during the last twelve months and checked their responses against each club’s sign-in system . In both cases, almost half of all respondents overestimated the actual number of times they participated by more than 100 percent. 3. Other methods include shadow studies, onsite observation, and “beeper” studies, as reviewed in appendix A. 4. A time-diary survey of almost 10,000 respondents from 1992 to 1994 was conducted for the Environmental Protection Agency (Robinson and Godbey 1999), but it is not included in our analyses because of its lack of sufficient family information. 5. We examined child care across all years, restricting 1985, 1995, and 2000 to respondents interviewed between October and December for comparability with the 1965 and 1975 samples. We found little variation in child care 223 between the fall and subsequent months for either mothers or fathers and hence use the full samples in later years in our analysis. 6. Our year 2000 time point in tables in subsequent chapters is based on the diaries collected in 1998 through 2001 in the two studies. 7. The sample was restricted to middle-class, dual-earner families because this was the target population of interest to the funder, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s Working Families Program headed by Kathleen Christensen. Chapter 3 1. Gender specialization was probably at its peak after World War II during the U.S. Baby Boom. Unique economic circumstances bolstered sole wage earning on the part of the husbands, allowing men to earn a family wage (Levy 1998). Earlier in the twentieth century, husbands and wives were often both involved in the work of small family businesses or farms. 2. This point is significant because research suggests that stepparents may be less involved in child rearing than biological parents (Hofferth et al. 2002; Hofferth and Anderson 2004). 3. Some argue that the overburden cannot be measured in hours, as women continually do more family “mental managing” work. Others focus on the different qualities of women’s and men’s work, arguing that unpaid work has lower status and is more onerous. Still others point to deleterious consequences of women’s economic dependency in the relatively common situation of divorce. Although these are important arguments, the ability to assess these is beyond the scope of our study. Chapter 4 1. None of these measures double count child care time per se. However, if we were to add the second and third measures together with time spent in all the different primary activities over the course of the day, our second and third measures (ones that include secondary time in child care activities and all time with children) would result in totals greater than 24 hours. 2. See coding categories 22 to 25 in table 2.1. 3. This of course assumes that mothers’ and fathers’ time is additive and not redundant. To the extent that mother’s and father’s time overlaps, the differences between children in one-parent and two-parent homes may not be as great as these estimates suggest. 4. Although secondary activities were collected in 1965 and 1985, the data that were archived either do not include the secondary activity data (1985) or do not include sufficient...