Search

On the surface, an average day of caregivers is not considerably different from non-caregivers, but caregivers spend more time doing housework and less–doing work or enjoying leisure activities. Using the Japanese Time Use Survey, we perform cluster analysis and identify five patterns of daily time-use lifestyles of elder caregivers: (1) the leisurely weekend caregivers, (2) the multitaskers, (3) the sandwich caregivers, (4) the working poor caregivers, and (5) the agriculture/construction traveler caregivers. Our results show that the first three groups spend the most time on caregiving activities, but a larger proportion of sandwich caregivers report doing eldercare on the diary day. Care activities for sandwich caregivers are more likely to coincide with housework, which increases the volume of the total unpaid work significantly. The fourth type of daily time use patterns and their demographic profiles reveal that they are heavily overrepresented by the working poor, hence the choice of the name of the category. Even among other types, caregivers are more likely to live in households that have lower income than non-caregivers. Our results imply that caregivers face higher economic strain than non-caregivers, even among those caregivers who work. This applies particularly to women because the findings also indicate that women are more likely to be caregivers than men.

We analyze cross-sectional time-use diaries from the 2011 and 2016 Survey on Time Use and Leisure Activities (Shakai Seikatsu Kihon Chosa) to investigate the association between educational level and housework participation in contexts where educational attainment among women does not readily translate into workforce stability. We test whether higher levels of educational attainment are associated with the decrease in housework participation as the previous research in countries of the global north suggests. Our findings reveal that education is not likely to reduce housework participation among Japanese women. Married Japanese women with children are unlikely to reduce their time spent on housework with the increase of their educational level and married Japanese women without children are more likely to increase their housework participation proportionately to the level of their education. The results suggest that in Japan, the supply-side solutions to gender inequality (such as increasing educational opportunities for women) do not remedy the situation. The country needs to address structural and institutional barriers to gender equality.

International audience; We study the scheduling of work by using optimal matching analysis. We show that optimal matching can be adapted to the number of periodicities and theoretical concerns of the topic by adjusting its costs and parameters. Optimal matching is applied at two stages to define workdays and workweeks at the first and second stage respectively. There were five types of workdays and seven types of workweeks in the UK between 2000 and 2001. Standard workdays represented just over a half of workdays and standard workweeks constituted one in four workweeks. There were three types of part-time workweeks.

This paper builds on the existing literature about the distribution of financial resources within the household between couple members. Using data from the British Household Panel Study (BHPS) we examine the ownership of, and amounts held in savings, investments and debts by couple members, and how these vary by individual and household characteristics. A particular focus is the extent to which financial resources derived from paid employment are allocated within the household through the ownership of assets and debts by couple members. We also examine the relationship between the ownership of assets and liabilities with individual psychological well-being.

We investigate the nature of measurement error in time use data. Analysis of stylised recall questionnaire estimates and diary-based estimates of housework time from the same respondents gives evidence of systematic biases in the stylised estimates and large random errors in both types of data. We examine the effect of these measurement problems on three common types of statistical analyses in which the time use variable is used as: (i) a dependent variable, (ii) an explanatory variable, and (iii) a basis for cross-tabulations. We develop methods to correct the biases induced by these measurement errors.

In this paper, we calibrate a set of time use variables for a long-running panel survey (the British Household Panel Survey, BHPS, 1994 2004) from evidence derived from a smaller scale panel survey that collected time use information by both the survey method and the diary method from the same respondents (the Home On-line Study, HoL, 1999 2001). Past research has suggested that the time diary method produces more accurate and reliable measures of time use than the survey approach. The diary approach, however, usually has a low response rate and is not practicable for a large-scale panel study like the BHPS. On the other hand, direct questioning in survey interviews is a relatively flexible approach to collect time use data. We therefore propose a method to combine the strengths of the survey approach and the diary method to produce time use data. The survey part of the HoL study shares the same questionnaire-derived time-use predictor variables with the BHPS. We use regression of the predictors on the time diary data in the HoL study to calibrate time use in the BHPS by multiplying the resulting regression coefficients with the same predictor variables in the BHPS. Then we get a calibrated index of time-use patterns based on BHPS questionnaire items. The calibrated time use variables cover all major categories of daily activities and are available in Wave 4 (1994) to Wave 14 (2004) of the BHPS. They are useful resources for the study of time use practices and the life course.

This paper develops a continuously scaled indicator of social position (the Essex Score), which is estimated as individuals potential wage in the labour market. The Essex Score is designed as a tool to investigate patterns of differentiation in life chances. It is constructed based on individuals educational qualifications, recent experience in employment and non-employment, and occupational attainment using data from all the currently available 13 waves of the British Household Panel Survey. The Essex Score represents those embodied economic resources salient to individuals participation in the labour market, equivalent to human capital in economic literature, and sometimes indicated by social class categories in sociological research. It has advantages over other social class measures. Being based on educational levels and on degrees of present and past attachment to the labour market as well as on present or previous occupational membership, it covers the entire adult population irrespective of their employment status and employment history. Its continuous level measurement also allows aggregation of scores from an individual to a household level, as well as the sensitive investigation of the determinants and consequences of changes in social position during the life course.

This article uses a nine-year period of work-life history data from the British Household Panel Survey (1991-1999) to examine married/cohabiting womens work trajectories. In particular, it tests some major contentions of Hakims (2000) preference theory. Both supportive and opposing evidence for the theory has been found. First, concurring with Hakims arguments, women who have followed a home-career path hold consistently more home-centred attitudes over time than women who have been committed to their employment careers. Moreover, it is found that presence of dependent children has little or no negative effect on a work-centred womans chance of being engaged in full-time work. But the findings could not rule out the possibility that womens employment careers are still constrained. The most work-centred women (as revealed in their gender role attitudes in the nine-year period), despite having been committed mostly to a full-time work, still have displayed a certain degree of discontinuity in their career pursuits. Finally, contrary to corollary of the preference theory, the relationship between gender role attitudes and womens participation in labour market work is reciprocal rather than unidirectional. That is, womens work orientation is endogenous to their labour market experiences.