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This article compares stylised (questionnaire-based) estimates and diary-based estimates of housework time collected from the same respondents. Data come from the Home On-line Study (1999-2001), a British national household survey that contains both types of estimates (sample size = 632 men and 666 women). It shows that the gap between the two types of estimate is generally smaller in the case of women. But the gap between the estimates in the case of women is associated with the amount of housework performed as secondary activities and the level of irregularity in housework hours. Presence of dependent children, on the other hand, inflates the gap for both men and women. Men holding traditional gender-role attitudes tend to report more housework time in surveys than in diaries, but the tendency is reversed when they undertake long hours of housework. The overall results suggest that there are systematic errors in stylised housework time estimates.

This article applies theoretical ideas in the literature on the household division of labor to the analysis of partners' political preferences. We regress men's and women's political party preferences on their own and their partners' characteristics using data from the 1991 British Household Panel Survey (N = 2,846). We find a symmetrical pattern of influence: Men and women both give greatest weight to their own political values but also accord some significant weight to their partners' values. Economically dependent men, however, place virtually no emphasis on their partners' political values. Apart from this, we suggest that there may be a process of mutual accommodation within couples regarding political preferences that leads to greater concordance in the partners' preferences over time.

Intergenerational families play an important role in providing informal care and support. However, how the intergenerational living arrangements shape the time allocation of young couples remains unclear, and a more comprehensive analysis, where downward support and upward support are distinguished, is needed. Using the "2008 Chinese Time Use Survey" and the seemingly unrelated regression, we document how paid work time, housework and adult care time, and childcare time differ for working-age couples who live with none, relatively young, and relatively old parents. We find that the direction of support changes according to the age of the coresident parents. Compared with those who do not live with parents, couples who live with relatively young parents spend less time on housework and adult care, and those who live with relatively old parents have less paid work time, more housework and adult care time, and those rural wives living with elderly parents even spend less time on childcare. These findings highlight the importance of distinguishing the direction of help for studying intergenerational families and the high time cost of adult care in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]