TERP Winter 2019

TIME LIVES OF OUR

Short on free time? A UMD lab shows how society may be robbing you of yours— or giving you a bonus

By Chris Carroll Illustrations by Jason Keisling

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BASKET PILED WITH UNFOLDED LAUNDRY.

Kickoff for the big game in 10 minutes. A toddler waking up grumpy from a nap. Although these circumstances may appear unrelated, ask yourself how you’d typically handle each one. With just that information, researchers in the Maryland Time Use Laboratory, the country’s leading center for time-use studies, can start drawing a picture of who you are, from your gender to the kind of work you do. If that sounds like a parlor game, the field’s real goal is to understand how people live their lives and how sweeping social and economic changes affect them, says Liana Sayer, a sociology professor and the lab’s director. Researchers there analyze data stretching back to the 1960s and collect new information

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through “time diaries” kept by study participants. (Sayer and colleague Sandra Hofferth, family studies professor emerita, maintain a repository of such data—ipums Time Use—drawn on by researchers nationwide.) These detailed accounts bypass faulty memories and wishful thinking about how we think we should spend our time. They also provide insights into persistent societal inequities that determine who actually has to fold the clothes, who gets to sit back and watch a game on TV and who cares for a family’s children. “Time-use studies give us an unvarnished assessment of what people and societies value, and how those differ by gender or by race, ethnicity or social class,” Sayer says. “It’s a useful lens to view broad macroeconomic shifts as well as normative shifts, and connect those to people’s everyday lives.”

Dads’ Leisure World The mother-father leisure gap has grown—nearly doubling since 1975—as more women have moved into the workplace, taking on new responsibilities while still carrying the load at home.

67 minutes

7.8 hours