Time use: what's the Big Question?

Whole academic publishing industries have been built around Big Questions. There's the Big Trust Question: “Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you need to be very careful in dealing with people?” There's the Big Satisfaction Question: "All things considered, how satisfied are you with your life as a whole these days?" Then there are the Big Questions about labour force participation, unemployment, and so on - questions so big that they are the subject of international conventions.

Last week I was asked "what is the big question about time use?" My first thought was to look at the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP). The Family and Gender Roles cycle contains a candidate for The Big Time Use Question:

Q16a On average, how many hours a week do you personally spend on household work, not including childcare and leisure time activities?

It's not a perfect question. I worry that respondents would recall stereotypically female tasks, such as cleaning, in response to a question about "household work", and not think of, say, car repairs, home maintenance or yard work. This would tend to lead to an underestimate of the total amount of unpaid work done within the household, especially the work done by men (to see the question in context, click here). But it's a simple, straightforward question, and it produces nice, clean easy-to-analyze responses - which are both good things.

The housework question is a big one for academic researchers, both economists and sociologists. It's a big one for the media, who love stories like Do Couples Who Share Housework Really Have Less Sex or Couples who Divide Chores Equally Happen to Have More Sex. But can economists convince policy makers that how much time people spend cooking and cleaning matters? Academics can say that unpaid work is an important source of economic well-being, and policy makers will say "yes, yes" and do nothing. I believe that most policy makers feel that the government has no place in the kitchens of the nation, and are reluctant to intervene in household work, which they see as essentially a private matter. 

One argument for caring about housework that has some traction with policy makers is that, because our national accounts ignore the value of unpaid work, GDP significantly overstates the benefits of a person moving from own-account production (cleaning their own house) to the market economy (getting a job with a regular paycheque and hiring someone to clean their house).  However a key "take-away" from this line of argument is that, when people lose their jobs, it's not as bad as the GDP numbers make it seem, because household production will increase.  But trying to persuade governments to care less about unemployment hardly seems like a good reason to go and collect time use data.

Another argument that might resonate with policy makers is that household work obligations prevent women from entering the labour force, giving their children good quality care, or achieving other goals. But then, what can policy makers do? In a developing country context, quite a bit: build wells to reduce the amount of time required to fetch water; fund fuel-efficient, high performance stoves, to reduce the amount of time required to prepare meals; provide villages with electricity, so women can use household appliances to ease the burden of household work. But is One Big Household Work Question enough to persuade policy makers to, for example, build wells, or is necessary to get hard data on the amount of time people spend collecting water - the kind of data that can only be obtained through a detailed time diary?

An alternative candidate for the Big Time Use Question is the ISSP's question on caring work:

Q16b On average, how many hours a week do you spend looking after family members (e.g. children, elderly, ill or disabled family members)? 

Here it's easier to see how to get leverage with policy makers. The well-being of children, the elderly, and the disabled depend critically upon the amount of care they receive, hence paternalist policy makers - ones who are concerned about the well-being of dependent and vulnerable people - will want to know about caregiving. Moreover, caring work is something that governments can do something about - providing and/or subsidizing child care provision, home visits for the elderly, services to people with disabilities, and so on.

Unfortunately, it's not obvious that these "how many hours a week" caring questions provide useable answers. Much care work is carried out while doing other things. For example, does breastfeeding while watching the Daily Show count as time spent looking after a family member, or is it time spent watching TV?  Does taking your kids to the beach on a perfect summer day count as looking after family members? The best way to get accurate information about caring work is to get respondents to keep a time diary, and record both their primary and secondary activities at regular intervals throughout the day. That imposes a non-trivial burden on respondents, and the data takes time to code and analyze - but in my view it's worth it.

My skepticism about Big Time Use Questions is partially shaped by the Canadian census experience. In 1996, 2001 and 2006, the Canadian census included the following three part question on time use:

33. Last week, how many hours did this person spend doing the following activities:

(a) doing unpaid housework, yard work or home maintenance for members of this household, or others?

Some examples include: preparing meals, washing the car, doing laundry, cutting the grass, shopping, household planning, etc.

Responses: None / Less than 5 hours / 5 to 14 hours / 15 to 29 hours / 30 to 59 hours /60 hours or more

 (b) looking after one or more of this person's own children, or the children of others, without pay?

Some examples include: bathing or playing with young children, driving children to sports activities or helping them with homework, talking with teens about their problems, etc.

Responses: None / Less than 5 hours / 5 to 14 hours / 15 to 29 hours / 30 to 59 hours /60 hours or more

(c) providing unpaid care or assistance to one or more seniors?

Some examples include: providing personal care to a senior family member, visiting seniors, talking with them on the telephone, helping them with shopping, banking or with taking medication, etc.

Responses: None / Less than 5 hours / 5 to 14 hours / 15 to 29 hours / 30 to 59 hours /60 hours or more

The Big Time Use Question was put on the Canadian census in response to campaigns by feminist activists - some inspired by the work of Marilyn Waring, some seeking to increase recognition of the value of women's work in the home. It's now been dropped - for a discussion of the reasoning behind that decision see this House of Commons report. The Census's single time use question provided much less accurate data than the time diary information collected in the General Social Survey (GSS), hence researchers, policy makers, and others essentially ignored the Census data in favour of the GSS. 

Does this mean that the search for the Big Time Use Question is futile? No. Specific countries have specific policy challenges - with elder care, for example, or obesity, or transportation. Time use questions that speak to specific issues, for example, "how much much time did you spend in physical activity yesterday?" can have big policy impacts. But it's a matter of figuring out the Big Problems that need Big Answers - and working from there to the Big Question.

 

Comments

[Sandwichman]

"This struggle about the legal restriction of the hours of labor raged the more fiercely since, apart from frightened avarice, it told indeed upon the great contest between the blind rule of the supply and demand laws which form the political economy of the middle class, and social production controlled by social foresight, which forms the political economy of the working class." --Karl Marx, Inaugural Address of the International Working Men’s Association

The trouble with Time Use statistics is that The Big Question is subordinated to an Even Bigger Question that is left unstated and implicit. In this paradigm, "social production controlled by social foresight" comes as an afterthought. Better an afterthought than no thought at all? Possibly not.

Why can't we HONESTLY have two co-existing political economies, the political economy of the economists and the "political economy of the working class" and permit them to radiate insights onto each other? But no. There is one and only one hegemonic political economy and questions that cannot be answered from scrutinizing "the blind rule of the laws of supply and demand" must be treated as subordinate, peripheral... "external" to the really, really important question of How Big is the GDP and How Can We Make It Even Bigger?

[Frances Woolley]

Sandwichman - I'm not sure that I precisely understand your comment, but I would say that it's important to distinguish between time use statistics in the satellite national account sense and statistics about time use.

I have a lot of reservations about the agenda of using time use statistics to put a value on unpaid household work and include that number in the national income accounts - perhaps you do too. Not that I see a great deal of harm in it, I just don't think it does a lot.

But knowing how people spend their time is absolutely crucial when it comes to formulating specific policies that benefit the so-called working class. E.g. think about the amount of time it takes people who don't have a car to go grocery shopping, or take kids to after school activities. One of the best ways of understanding how other people live is to find out how they spend their time.

[Sandwichman]

"think about the amount of time it takes people who don't have a car to go grocery shopping"

Which requires information about urban spatial arrangements, the opportunity cost of the time spent working to pay for the car etc., etc. all of which are elided "givens" in the diarization of time use.

How much leisure do the unemployed have? What "choices" do people make when they are faced with an extremely limited range of choices? Few to none would be my answer.

A BIG question then might be "what do people struggle for politically (in terms specifically of time use) when and if they struggle?"

Or, what if people could get together and talk about time use and develop scenarios based on different possibilities and then choose between those scenarios?

There are myriad ways questions about time use could be approached. Time use surveys adopt a format that presumes the normativity of categories of paid work, unpaid work and leisure as distinct realms of activity that can be quantified with little attention paid to the qualities of each. This paradigm is both historically specific and privileges an "expert" class perspective. Not that there is anything wrong with that -- other than its limitation. All social investigation is historically specific and perspectival.

But there IS something wrong with the hegemony of that perspective. There is something wrong with the rejection of the counter-hegemonic perspectives as "false", "incomprehensible" or peripheral. As John Stuart Mill wrote in On Liberty, "He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that."

“He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion... Nor is it enough that he should hear the opinions of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them... he must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form.”