Time-use research is an interdisciplinary field of study dedicated to learning how people allocate their time during an average day. Work intensity is the umbrella topic that incorporates time use, specifically time poverty.
The comprehensive approach to time-use research addresses a wide array of political, economic, social, and cultural issues through the use of time-use surveys. Surveys provide geographic data and time diaries that volunteers record using GPS technology and time diaries. Time-use research investigates human activity inside and outside the paid economy. It also looks at how these activities change over time.
Time-use research is not to be confused with time management. Time-use research is a social science interested in human behavioural patterns and seeks to build a body of knowledge to benefit a wide array of disciplines interested in how people use their time. Time management is an approach to time allocation with a specific managerial purpose aimed at increasing the efficiency or effectiveness of a given process.
Questions relating to time-use research arise in most professional and academic disciplines, notably:
Time-use researcher Dagfinn Aas classifies time into four meaningful categories: contracted time; committed time; necessary time; and free time. [1]
Contracted time refers to the time a person allocates toward an agreement to work or study. When a person is using contracted time to commute this person understands that this travel time is directly related to paid work or study and any break in this commute time directly affects job- or school-related performance.
Committed time, like contracted time, takes priority over necessary and free time because it is viewed as productive work. It refers to the time allocated to maintain a home and family. When a person is commuting using committed time this person may feel that the commute is a duty to family such as walking children to school or driving a spouse to work. Contracted and committed time users may feel that their commute is more important than the commute of necessary or free time users because their commute is productive work. Therefore, they may be more inclined to choose a motorized mode of travel.
Necessary time refers to the time required to maintain one’s self as it applies to activities such as eating, sleeping, and cleansing and to a large extent exercising. People who commute using necessary time may feel that the commute is an important activity for personal well-being and may also take into account the well-being of the natural and social environment. The person commuting in necessary time may be more inclined to choose an active mode of transportation for personal reasons that include exercise on top of transportation.
Since sleeping is included in this category, necessary time usually constitutes the majority of people’s time.
Free time refers to the remains of the day after the three other types of time have been subtracted from the 24-hour day. This type of time is not necessarily discretionary time as the term “free” time may imply because people tend to plan activities in advance and creating committed free time in lieu of discretionary time. People who commute using free time are more apt to view the commute as a recreational activity. Commuting in free time provides the greatest gains for social capital because the person commuting in free time is more likely to slow down or stop the commute at his discretion to undertake another activity or engage in social interaction. He or she may also view the commute as part of his destination activity to which he has gladly committed his or her free time.
The distinction between primary and secondary time is a way to include activities when multitasking. Activities that take place at the same time are separated into primary and secondary categories based on priority assigned to each, with the activity with the highest priority considered to be the primary. This distinction plays an important role when evaluating time spent on activities that often considered secondary when multitasking, as overlooking secondary activities can lead to significant underestimations of the time committed to those activities.
According to research in Australia, approximately two thirds of time spent on childcare is considered secondary time. [2] Research in the United States is more variable ranging from approximately one third [3] [4] to approximately three fourths [5] of time spent on childcare being secondary time.
Primary time refers to time spent on a primary activity only. The primary activity is the activity that has the highest priority. For example, the primary task when drinking coffee while working would be working and the time therefore classified as contracted time. Assigning priority to each activity is left up to the person recording their time usage and similar combinations of activities may be treated differently under different circumstances. While eating in front of a television, both eating and watching television could be considered the primary activity depending on the circumstances.
Secondary time is the time spent on secondary or side activities. When drinking coffee while working, drinking coffee would be the secondary activity and would be considered necessary time even though the primary activity, working, would be classified as contracted time. Unlike primary time, secondary time does not necessarily add up to 24 hours each day because there may not always be a secondary activity. It is also important to note that including secondary time may make it appear that a person spends more than 24 hours a day on activities due to the overlapping nature primary and secondary time.
Transport economics is a branch of economics founded in 1959 by American economist John R. Meyer that deals with the allocation of resources within the transport sector. It has strong links to civil engineering. Transport economics differs from some other branches of economics in that the assumption of a spaceless, instantaneous economy does not hold. People and goods flow over networks at certain speeds. Demands peak. Advance ticket purchase is often induced by lower fares. The networks themselves may or may not be competitive. A single trip may require the bundling of services provided by several firms, agencies and modes.
In economics, a public good is a good that is both non-excludable and non-rivalrous. Use by one person neither prevents access by other people, nor does it reduce availability to others. Therefore, the good can be used simultaneously by more than one person. This is in contrast to a common good, such as wild fish stocks in the ocean, which is non-excludable but rivalrous to a certain degree. If too many fish were harvested, the stocks would deplete, limiting the access of fish for others. A public good must be valuable to more than one user, otherwise, its simultaneous availability to more than one person would be economically irrelevant.
Economic geography is the subfield of human geography that studies economic activity and factors affecting it. It can also be considered a subfield or method in economics.
Feminist economics is the critical study of economics and economies, with a focus on gender-aware and inclusive economic inquiry and policy analysis. Feminist economic researchers include academics, activists, policy theorists, and practitioners. Much feminist economic research focuses on topics that have been neglected in the field, such as care work, intimate partner violence, or on economic theories which could be improved through better incorporation of gendered effects and interactions, such as between paid and unpaid sectors of economies. Other feminist scholars have engaged in new forms of data collection and measurement such as the Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM), and more gender-aware theories such as the capabilities approach. Feminist economics is oriented towards the goal of "enhancing the well-being of children, women, and men in local, national, and transnational communities."
Commuting is periodically recurring travel between a place of residence and place of work or study, where the traveler, referred to as a commuter, leaves the boundary of their home community. By extension, it can sometimes be any regular or often repeated travel between locations, even when not work-related. The modes of travel, time taken and distance traveled in commuting varies widely across the globe. Most people in least-developed countries continue to walk to work. The cheapest method of commuting after walking is usually by bicycle, so this is common in low-income countries but is also increasingly practised by people in wealthier countries for environmental and health reasons. In middle-income countries, motorcycle commuting is very common.
Health care, or healthcare, is the improvement of health via the prevention, diagnosis, treatment, amelioration or cure of disease, illness, injury, and other physical and mental impairments in people. Health care is delivered by health professionals and allied health fields. Medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, midwifery, nursing, optometry, audiology, psychology, occupational therapy, physical therapy, athletic training, and other health professions all constitute health care. The term includes work done in providing primary care, secondary care, tertiary care, and public health.
Travel behavior is the study of what people do over geography, and how people use transport.
Employment is a relationship between two parties regulating the provision of paid labour services. Usually based on a contract, one party, the employer, which might be a corporation, a not-for-profit organization, a co-operative, or any other entity, pays the other, the employee, in return for carrying out assigned work. Employees work in return for wages, which can be paid on the basis of an hourly rate, by piecework or an annual salary, depending on the type of work an employee does, the prevailing conditions of the sector and the bargaining power between the parties. Employees in some sectors may receive gratuities, bonus payments or stock options. In some types of employment, employees may receive benefits in addition to payment. Benefits may include health insurance, housing, and disability insurance. Employment is typically governed by employment laws, organisation or legal contracts.
In social behavior, downshifting is a trend where individuals adopt simpler lives from what critics call the "rat race".
Carpooling is the sharing of car journeys so that more than one person travels in a car, and prevents the need for others to have to drive to a location themselves. Carpooling is considered a Demand-Responsive Transport (DRT) service.
Sponsoring something is the act of supporting an event, activity, person, or organization financially or through the provision of products or services. The individual or group that provides the support, similar to a benefactor, is known as the sponsor.
Children's culture includes children's cultural artifacts, children's media and literature, and the myths and discourses spun around the notion of childhood. Children's culture has been studied within academia in cultural studies, media studies, and literature departments. The interdisciplinary focus of childhood studies could also be considered in the paradigm of social theory concerning the study of children's culture.
Media multitasking is the concurrent use of multiple digital media streams. Media multitasking has been associated with depressive symptoms and social anxiety by a study involving 318 participants. A 2018 review found that while the literature is sparse and inconclusive, people who do a heavy amount of media multitasking have worse performance in several cognitive domains. One of the authors commented that while the data does not "unambiguously show that media multitasking causes a change in attention and memory," media multitasking is an inefficient practice that requires "task switching" costs including "limitations in auditory and visual processing".
A schedule or a timetable, as a basic time-management tool, consists of a list of times at which possible tasks, events, or actions are intended to take place, or of a sequence of events in the chronological order in which such things are intended to take place. The process of creating a schedule — deciding how to order these tasks and how to commit resources between the variety of possible tasks — is called scheduling, and a person responsible for making a particular schedule may be called a scheduler. Making and following schedules is an ancient human activity.
Human multitasking is the concept that one can split their attention on more than one task or activity at the same time, such as speaking on the phone while driving a car.
Deviance or the sociology of deviance explores the actions and/or behaviors that violate social norms across formally enacted rules as well as informal violations of social norms. Although deviance may have a negative connotation, the violation of social norms is not always a negative action; positive deviation exists in some situations. Although a norm is violated, a behavior can still be classified as positive or acceptable.
Values scales are psychological inventories used to determine the values that people endorse in their lives. They facilitate the understanding of both work and general values that individuals uphold. In addition, they assess the importance of each value in people's lives and how the individual strives toward fulfillment through work and other life roles, such as parenting. Most scales have been normalized and can therefore be used cross-culturally for vocational, marketing, and counseling purposes, yielding unbiased results. Psychologists, political scientists, economists, and others interested in defining values, use values scales to determine what people value, and to evaluate the ultimate function or purpose of values.
Work intensity is defined as activity in relation to the capacity for that work. It is a topic that affects developed and developing countries in different ways. There are many aspects to work intensity including multitasking, time poverty, health implications, and policy considerations. Multitasking is the overlap of many activities, usually care and informal work, that negatively impacts the livelihood of people, especially women, in the developing world. Time poverty is defined as the lack of time for leisure and rest activities after time spent working. High work intensity coupled with multitasking and time poverty has a negative correlation with health outcomes. Work intensity is seldom considered when proposing new policy and legislation. As more women enter the workforce, work intensity and its implications are being brought to the forefront of policy, development, and empowerment debates.
Margaret E. Slade is Professor Emeritus at the Vancouver School of Economics at the University of British Columbia and was a council member of the Royal Economic Society from 2004 to 2008. Slade is best known for her work on Industrial Economics, serving as the President of the European Association for Research in Industrial Economics (EARIE) from 2001 to 2003.
Transport divide refers to unequal access to transportation. It can result in the social exclusion of disadvantaged groups.