The Changing Rhythms of American Family Life

Chapter 2: Measuring Family Time

Chapter 2 Measuring Family Time T HIS BOOK takes advantage of a unique social science measurement technique for examining family change: the time diary. Most of what is known about changing family life is based either on small observational studies of unknown generalizability, or on surveys that measure market work but provide relatively little information on other spheres of life, such as family caregiving and leisure activities. These studies have left unresolved questions about time allocation outside the market. The answers require data that assess all productive activities, not just market activities. Time diaries cover all daily activities—market work and also leisure, personal, and family care activities. Moreover, as we will show, they suggest a rather different set of conclusions about family life than research using other measurement techniques (Robinson and Godbey 1999). Measuring Family Time Use Most of what we know about time use comes from questions embedded in surveys that ask respondents to estimate how much time they spend on an activity during a particular time period (for example, a typical week). A rich body of historical data from national samples relies solely on estimates to measure time spent working (from the Current Population Survey), doing volunteer work (from Independent Sector organizations), traveling (from the U.S. Department of Transportation), and watching television (from the Roper Organization and the General Social Survey). The most widely used measure of market work hours comes from the Current Population Survey (CPS), in which respondents estimate how many hours they worked in the previous week and report the usual hours per week they worked in the preceding year. The CPS has been the gold standard for assessing change in the work patterns of men and women, mothers and fathers. One advantage of CPS-type estimate questions is that they take a respondent three to ten seconds to answer, whereas the complete time diary takes up to fifteen minutes. That makes it quite cost effective to ask estimate questions of much larger samples, such as the 19 CPS, which surveys all workers in about 50,000 households every month. In contrast, time-diary studies are based on samples of 1,000 to 5,000 respondents and have been mainly done once a decade.1 Another advantage is that the CPS has been administered since the late 1940s, whereas the first national diary study was not conducted until 1965 and had notably lower response rates. Moreover, the time coverage of the estimate question—a week—is far broader than that of the diary, which has usually been only for a single day. Thus, over the thirty-five years of time-diary research in the United States, studies cover a grand total of about 2,000 weeks (or 14,000 days) among those age eighteen to sixty-four, compared to CPS estimates covering millions of respondent weeks. The CPS also makes it possible—as we do in the first part of the next chapter—to examine detailed breakouts of work hours by gender, by marital status, by presence and ages of children , and the like. Estimate questions have drawbacks, however. Recalling details about time spent in an activity involves complicated calculations. Asking someone , “How many hours do you work?” assumes that each respondent interprets work in the same way, searches memory for all episodes of work, and is able to properly add all the episode lengths across the day or across days in the last week. Obtaining accurate responses on time use is particularly difficult in the survey context, in which respondents are expected to provide on-the-spot answers in a few seconds. What seems at first to be a simple estimate task turns out to involve several steps that are quite difficult to perform, even for a respondent with regular and clear work hours and a repetitive daily routine. One consequence is that, when asked to provide daily and weekly estimates of several activities, survey respondents give estimates that add up to considerably more than the 168 hours of time each week (Chase and Godbey 1983; Hawes, Talarzyk, and Blackwell 1975; and Verbrugge and Gruber-Baldine 1993).2 The appeal of the time-diary approach is that respondents are not asked to make complex, vague, and changing calculations, but to simply recall their activities sequentially for a specific period, usually the previous day. That way, it is possible to reduce the respondents’ recall period and reporting task, first to cover all daily activity, and second to ensure that the...