Publications by CTUR Members

This paper is set in the context of macrosocial/macroeconomic theories of the organization of both paid and unpaid work. The specific topic investigated is engagement in unpaid voluntary work, an activity which is thought to be important for social cohesion, civil society and citizenship. Research on the sources of social cohesion has focused on organizational membership and voluntary organization activity. There has been little investigation of informal helping of non-resident kin, friends or acquaintances, an activity which is not measured in most social surveys but is measured in time use surveys. Previous research shows that the highly educated are more likely to engage in formal voluntary organizations and data from the UK 2000 HETUS survey confirm that the highly educated spend more time on formally organised voluntary work. However, the less qualified, particularly women, spend more time on extra-household unpaid helping activities. Since both types of voluntary work are partly dependent on available time, these findings are modelled adjusting for time allocated to paid work, study, family and personal care. The findings remain statistically significant. Drawing on work carried out by the Office for National Statistics, a monetary value is placed on both formally organized and informal voluntary work. Although the median wage rates for formal voluntary work are greater than those for informal helping, the latter is greater in frequency and duration and therefore more economically valuable from a population perspective. This finding is discussed in the light of recent debates on citizenship and gender.

This article uses data from various waves of the British Household Panel Survey (1993—2003) to examine the associations of housework hours with relative income and gender-role attitudes. In particular, it tests the hypothesis that the effect of relative income on housework time will be diminished due to one's gendered expectations. Findings show both men's and women's housework hours are significantly decreased with increases in their amount of income relative to their partners'.Traditionalism in gender-role attitudes is associated with longer housework hours in the case of women and shorter hours in the case of men.Women holding traditional attitudes spend longer hours on housework than other women with the same level of economic independency. Apart from this, there is no conclusive evidence to support the claim that highly economic independent women and highly economic dependent men tend to resort to a gender-traditional form of domestic division of labour.

This article addresses the dilemma of consumption for those in income-rich, time-poor households in the contemporary affluent economies of the West. Following Linder, two `temporal strategies of consumption' are proposed, reflected in the consumption profiles of high status groups. The first is `voracious' consumption, denoting a fast `pace' and variety of leisure participation. The second is inconspicuous consumption — the purchasing of expensive consumer goods without the time to use them or the primary intent to display them. From a political economic perspective a solution is provided as to how to increase consumer spending among those with high disposable incomes and little leisure time

The American Heritage Time Use Study (AHTUS) represents a harmonised historical data file of time use by adults, amalgamating surveys collected in 1965 - 66, 1975 - 76, 1985, 1992 - 94, and 2003. The objectives of time-use studies have ranged from evaluating household and other unpaid production of goods and services, to monitoring of media use, to comparing lifestyles of more and less privileged social groups, or to tracking broad shifts in social behaviour. The purpose of this paper is to describe the process and utility of identifying and compiling data from the AHTUS to describe a range of walking behaviours collected using time-use survey methods over almost 40 years in the USA. This is a secondary data analysis of an existing amalgamated data set. Noting source survey-specific limitations in comparability of design, we determined age-standardized participation (and associated durations) in any walking, walking for exercise, walking for transport, walking the dog, sports/exercise (excluding walking), and all physical activity for those survey years for which sufficient relevant data details were available. 

The American Heritage Time Use Study (AHTUS) represents a harmonised historical data file of time use by adults, amalgamating surveys collected in 1965–66, 1975–76, 1985, 1992–94, and 2003. The objectives of time-use studies have ranged from evaluating household and other unpaid production of goods and services, to monitoring of media use, to comparing lifestyles of more and less privileged social groups, or to tracking broad shifts in social behaviour. The purpose of this paper is to describe the process and utility of identifying and compiling data from the AHTUS to describe a range of walking behaviours collected using time-use survey methods over almost 40 years in the USA. This is a secondary data analysis of an existing amalgamated data set. Noting source survey-specific limitations in comparability of design, we determined age-standardized participation (and associated durations) in any walking, walking for exercise, walking for transport, walking the dog, sports/exercise (excluding walking), and all physical activity for those survey years for which sufficient relevant data details were available. Data processing revealed inconsistencies in instrument administration, coding various types of walking and in prompting other sport/exercise across surveys. Thus for the entire period, application of inferential statistics to determine trend for a range of walking behaviours could not be done with confidence. Focusing on the two most comparable survey years, 1985 and 2003, it appears that walking for exercise in America has increased in popularity on any given day (from 2.9 to 5.4% of adults) and accumulated duration amongst those who walk for exercise (from 30 to 45 mins/day). Dog walking has decreased in popularity over the same time period (from 9.4 to 2.6%). Associated duration amongst dog walkers was stable at 30 mins/day. The noted and sometimes substantial differences in methods between the various survey administrations preclude stringent interpretation of these trends in walking behaviours and the use of conventional application of inferential statistics to evaluate significance of time trends. Although the AHTUS offers the most comprehensive attempt at harmonization yet undertaken with these individual time-use surveys, we found that any noted cross-time changes in walking and physical activity behaviour are not easily interpreted in terms of conventional epidemiological approaches and could be true changes, artefact related to instrument and method changes, or both. Public health utilization of the AHTUS, could be enhanced with greater attention to methodological issues known to influence estimation of physical activity behaviour in population. This could be achieved with cross-disciplinary collaboration between groups of experts in the various stages of these surveys.

A new measure of 'voraciousness' in leisure activities is introduced as an indicator of the pace of leisure, facilitating a theoretical linkage between the literature on time pressure, busyness and harriedness in late modernity, and the literature on cultural consumption. On the methodological side it is shown that time use diaries can provide at least as good a measure of the pace of leisure as survey based measures. Respondents with a high score on the voraciousness measure ('harried' respondents) are not less likely to complete their diaries than less harried respondents. In accord with the findings from the literature on cultural omnivorousness, the most voracious groups are those with high levels of social status and human capital. However, these associations are not due to these groups having either higher income or greater quantities of available leisure time. The pace of leisure activities must therefore be due to other factors, for example, could a fast pace of out-of-home leisure participation be conceived of as a new marker of status distinction?

We present evidence from a new comprehensive database of harmonized national time-diary data that standardizes information on almost 40 years of daily life in America. The advantages of the diary method over other ways of calculating how time is spent are reviewed, along with its ability to generate more reliable and accurate measures of productive activity than respondent estimates or other alternatives. We then discuss the various procedures used to develop these harmonized data, both to standardize reporting detail and to match with Census Bureau population characteristics. We then use these data to document historical shifts in Americans’ use of time, particularly focusing on gendered change in paid and unpaid work. We explore these data to find new and more complex evidence of continuing gender convergence, not just in aggregated totals of hours worked, but also in (1) the distributions of activity through the day and the week, (2) the sorts of activities that marital partners do together, as well as (3) the processes of construction of the diary accounts themselves.

We augment measures of cultural omnivorousness, based theoretically on the breadth of cultural tastes, with a new but related dimension of voraciousness. This reflects a ‘quantitative’ dimension of leisure consumption based upon both the range and the frequency of leisure participation. Voraciousness is theoretically interpreted in relation to notions of cultural repertoires, to the changing pace of work and leisure in late modernity, and to the ‘insatiable’ quality of contemporary consumption. From British time use data, voraciousness proved to share many relationships found in the analysis of omnivorousness, for example, with educational qualifications and job's social status. Moreover, these relationships persisted over time irrespective of individuals’ time and money resources. Since voraciousness is associated with high status individuals, and since it is not primarily about the availability of time or money, we argue that it is a symbolic status marker associated with notions such as being harried, keeping busy, multitasking, and embracing a diverse cultural consumption pattern.

Based on a genetic algorithm a computer simulation was constructed to generate the process of development of time-use among large population samples across long time-spans. The simulation uses empirical time-use data to reconstruct empirically observed behaviors, and tests the impact of parameters representing economic constraints and behavioral preferences. Seeding the simulation with random data and probabilistic combination rules, we produced an archetypal society with the same essential characteristics as the empirical data. The addition of empirically derived and theoretical evolutionary selection pressures alters the development of patterns of time-use, revealing the interplay between inhibiting constraints and motivation to adopt new behaviors.

The Centre for Time Use Research (CTUR), presently based at the Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of Essex in the UK, is pleased to announce the pre-release of the American Heritage Time Use Study (AHTUS). The AHTUS includes harmonised main activity, secondary activity, location, mode of transport, and who else was present variables at the episode level for national time use surveys collected in the USA in 1965-66, 1975-76, 1985, 1992-94, and 2003. This dataset is the first cross-time harmonised episode-level time use dataset available to users to download for free over the internet. The AHTUS features data enhancement, whereby information the diarist recorded at any point in the diary for an episode is recorded in all relevant diary columns. The activity “outdoor cleaning and maintenance”, for example, is used both to code the activity of house hold maintenance and cleaning and the location of outside; and mode of transport column entry “drive to work” is recorded as both main activity “commute” and mode of transport “car”. AHTUS weights 0-weight cases where the sex or age of the diarist or the day of the week when the diary was completed is missing as well as cases of low quality diaries (missing in excess of 90 minutes main activity time; or including fewer than 7 episodes; or missing two or more of four broad categories of activities which most people do daily: 1) some form of rest, sleep or time out; 2) eating or drinking; 3) some form of personal care; 4) travel). CTUR developed the AHTUS for the Yale University Program on Non-Market Accounts with funding from the Glaser Progress Foundation. The data and documentation are presently under review, but users can explore the near final documentation and download the test data from: http://www.timeuse.org/ahtus/.

What is the long-term effect of the emerging predominance of the dual-earner family? This study uses data from 3 national household panel surveys—the British Household Panel Survey (N= 16,044), the German Socioeconomic Panel (N= 14,164), and the U.S. Panel Study of Income Dynamics (N = 7,423)—which provide, for the first time, clear and direct longitudinal evidence of change in the balance of domestic labor within couples: evidence that women make large adjustments in their domestic work time immediately upon entering full-time paid work and that men exhibit a less obvious pattern of lagged adaptation, showing larger increases in domestic work in successive years.

“Busyness” plainly relates to externally observable work or leisure activities, but nevertheless the state itself is entirely subjective. I will argue in what follows, that there may have been fundamental changes in the connection between the external circumstances of work and leisure and internal feelings of “busyness”. Through the last century there have been fundamental shifts in the relationship between the pattern of daily activities, and patterns of societal sub- and superordination. “Are you busy?” may have had a quite different meaning as addressed to an upwardly mobile member of the Victorian English or American middle classes, as compared to an office worker at the turn of the third millennium. Individuals’ representations of their states of “busyness” play an important, and changing, role in establishing their positions in the order of social stratification. A leisure class (and hence I presume not busy) at the end of the 19th century perhaps, but the dominant groups in the early 21st are in the most straightforward sense of the word, workers. I will suggest that, reflecting this fundamental shift in social structure, the social construction of “busyness” has also changed.

The UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) has agreed to provide four year funding for a programme of work on time diary materials, “Time-use Studies, Daily Life and Social Change” based at ISER in Essex, and starting in October 2004. The programme includes a range of substantive projects bringing together micro time-use perspectives (studying sequences and aggregates of time-use at the individual level) with macro-perspectives such as time-based social accounting systems, into an integrated account of social change. It will also support work on time diary data resources, enabling among other activities a significant programme of extension and improvement to the Multinational Time Use Study (MTUS). Highest priority is work on the Harmonised European Time Use Study (HETUS), materials which, despite their name, are at present in need of considerable development before they are suitable for comparative research. Eurostat, which has sponsored HETUS from its inception in the early 1990s, is unable to make the micro-data available to researchers. The MTUS team has made a number of bilateral agreements with national authorities willing to contribute HETUS materials; so far we have consents to add data from Finland, Sweden, Norway, Netherlands, France, UK and Slovenia. We are in negotiation with Denmark, Germany and Italy, and other HETUS contributing countries are cordially invited to join in. Heritage materials from the US are also being revised (under a separate project, funded from a Yale University-based research foundation), so as to provide an appropriate historical comparator for the new American Time Use Study (ATUS) collected by the US Bureau of Labour Statistics and due for release in Summer 2004. The future MTUS work goes beyond the mere addition of recent datasets. We are also developing a new generation of comparative data files. A new release of WORLD5 data including a number of HETUS studies is expected by late summer, and further studies will be added as they become available. In addition we are developing a new WORLD6 format, that will include, for the first time, the original diary data in an activity sequence form, rather than as totals of time devoted to various sorts of activity, so as to enable use of the full range of time diary evidence (including multiple simultaneous activities, location and co-presence data) for analytic purposes.

A time budget might be derived from a continuous diary instrument or from a discrete-time log. And similarly, time and affect studies could be carried out using either data source. I will argue, in what follows, that there may in particular circumstance be advantages, for both purposes, to deploying both methodologies in the same study.

While recent emphasis has been placed on transformations of gender in the public sphere, changes in gender relations between heterosexual couples in the domestic sphere have been less fully developed in the theoretical literature. The author presents evidence for change at various levels, from the discursive to the quantitative. She outlines a theoretical framework for the analysis of such change based on the "doing gender" and gender consciousness perspectives, readdressed in the light of the new emphasis on discourses of reflexivity and intimacy. She argues for a conception of change that is slow and uneven, in which daily practices and interactions are linked to attitudes and discourse, perhaps over generations.

This paper discusses various conceptual ways of linking gender, leisure and tastes and offers a cross-time analysis of gender differences in the time allocated to different leisure activities in Britain. We ask whether men and women have similar leisure participation patterns over time and whether we can identify changes in the relative distribution of leisure activities between men and women. We discuss Bourdieu’s theory of distinction and Simmel’s trickle down theory as possible additional contributions to the understanding of differences in gender trends over time. We find some trends in participation which may be described in terms of Simmel’s trickle-down theory (for example, increasing participation in sports activities among women), some which support Bourdieu’s theory of distinction (for example, men’s participation in electronic media) and some which cannot adequately be described by either.

Addressing the relationship between consumption behaviour, leisure time and the market, we seek a solution to the problem of the maintenance of consumption expenditure in economies where leisure time is shortest for those who have the most to spend, a contradiction particularly characteristic of societies belonging to the politico-economic regime type identified as ‘liberal market’. In contrast to ideas of conspicuous consumption based on display, we present a concept of ‘inconspicuous consumption’ relating to an imagined future use of purchases already made. Expensive leisure goods that symbolize a wished-for self-identity or lifestyle are purchased by high-income earners with little leisure time. From the point of view of the production sector, the purpose is achieved and a sale is made. However, the purchased goods remain ‘in storage’ at home as symbols of a potential but unrealized and, in the meantime, unrealizable future. We illustrate different modalities of the practices of inconspicuous consumption and distinguish it from other consumption practices.

This article investigates the impact of use of the Worldwide Web on patterns of sociability. Its sets out a neofunctionalist model of socio-technological innovation that is designed to explore prospectively the impact of innovations in areas such as information and communications technology on the full range of sociable and nonsociable activities. It uses evidence from a unique data set (a nationally representative time diary panel study collected in the U.K. for the period 1999–2001) to explore this model. It concludes that Internet use, contrary to “time-displacement” expectations, is not negatively associated with sociability.

A number of general features of interest in a social policy context emerge from the evidence for changes in patterns of time use. The question that we address here is: is it possible to specify public policy regime effects on patterns of time use? Some hypotheses are advanced concerning likely patterns of relationship between the liberal and social-democratic public policy regimes and the use of time in these societies. The data used are drawn from a multinational time-use data archive held at the Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of Essex. A clear relationship is found between public policy regime and paid work time (those in liberal market regimes work longer on average), however, there are no consistent regime effects found either for the amount of time spent in different leisure activities or in respect of the domestic division of labor. The conclusion is that, at least in relation to the time-use variables used in the these analyses, the gender division of domestic labor and type of leisure activity represent different dimensions of variability than those commonly used in the classification of public policy regimes.