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Trends in Spouses’ Shared Time in the United States, 1965–2012

Demography

Abstract

Despite major demographic changes over the past 50 years and strong evidence that time spent with a spouse is important for marriages, we know very little about how time with a spouse has changed—or not—in the United States. Using time diary data from 1965–2012, we examine trends in couples’ shared time in the United States during a period of major changes in American marriages and families. We find that couples without children spent more total time together and time alone together in 2012 than they did in 1965, with total time and time alone together both peaking in 1975. For parents, time spent together increased between 1965 and 2012, most dramatically for time spent with a spouse and children. Decomposition analyses show that changes in behavior rather than changing demographics explain these trends, and we find that the increases in couples’ shared time are primarily concentrated in leisure activities.

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Notes

  1. Time diary surveys are available in the years 1985, 1993, 1995, and 1998. However, the data from 1985, 1993, and 1995 do not include information whether a spouse is present during daily activities. The data from 1998 include some information on co-presence of others but were excluded because they do not include comparable information on co-presence of a spouse.

  2. The survey collectors randomly selected the diary days across all samples. In 1965 and 1975, all days of the week were given an equal probability of selection for diary days. The ATUS data (2003, 2012) are sampled from all days of the week, with an over-sample of weekend days. This is accounted for in the analyses with survey weights.

  3. These data include multiple observations for most respondents. We cluster the standard errors at the person level to account for this in our models.

  4. The data from 1965 include only those couples with at least one employed spouse, so for comparability reasons, we restrict all samples to couples where at least one member is working. As a sensitivity analysis given the specific sampling strategy in 1965, we also control for broad occupational category in models containing 1965, 2003, and 2012 data (occupation is not available in 1975), and we see no meaningful differences in the estimates compared with parallel models excluding occupation.

  5. Previous research (see Dew 2009) did not account for variations in measurement across surveys; thus, differences in couples’ shared time reported previously for all activities with a spouse over time were overestimated.

  6. For comparability, we also create measures for shared time with a spouse and with a child from the original data. For 1965 (Converse and Robinson 1980) and 1975 (Juster et al. 2001), we code a spouse as present if the respondent mentioned being with a “spouse, fiancé(e)” during one of his or her two possible “with” responses. In 2003 and 2012 (Hofferth et al. 2013), respondents could report multiple people with whom they did an activity. We code respondents as being with his/her spouse if he/she listed a spouse as present. For time spent with a spouse and children, in 1965 and 1975 the respondent must have reported being with “children of household” in one of the two “with” measures; in the 2003 and 2012 data, respondents had to report being with at least their spouse and an own coresident biological, adopted, or step child under age 18. Because we cannot know precisely whether in 1965 and 1975 “children of household” included coresident adult children, we are conservative in our 2003 and 2012 coding in that we restrict children only to those under 18; we may therefore underestimate any change between 1965 and 2012.

  7. A third subcategory, which we do not consider independently, is time with a spouse and other individuals who are not children.

  8. Travel accounts for approximately 9 % of couples’ shared time across years (or 20–25 minutes per day on average); yet, there is little change in the time couples allocate to this type of activity, so we do not consider it here. All other activities combined make up approximately 4 % of measured daily time with a spouse and include the following primary activities: volunteering and religious activities, education-related activities, and adult caregiving. Year-specific means of time with a spouse in all activities are available upon request.

  9. We use OLS rather than Tobit models to perform these analyses because few respondents reported spending no time with their spouse in the time diaries, and recent research suggests that OLS models produce less-biased estimates than Tobit models for time-use analyses (Stewart 2013).

  10. The variables included as characteristics are the same as in the previous pooled OLS models.

  11. There is no difference in spousal time for parents (the difference is 0.6 minutes and is not statistically significant), so this difference is not decomposed.

  12. Because the results are similar, we show the characteristics from 2012 and the 1965 coefficients (results in panel B of Table 3) but do not discuss them.

  13. We find no statistically significant differences in parents’ time alone with a spouse between 1965 and 2012, net of controls. Our findings are inconsistent with Dew’s (2009) work because we account for differences across surveys in the measurement of the co-presence of others; specifically, whom respondents are with is not consistently asked during personal care and paid work activities, so time with a spouse in these activities must be excluded from our analysis to make accurate comparisons.

  14. Results from the supplemental analyses are available upon request.

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Acknowledgments

The authors gratefully acknowledge support from the Minnesota Population Center (P2C HD041023) and the Time Use Data Access System (R01 HD053654), both funded through grants from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute for Child Health and Human Development (NICHD).

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Correspondence to Katie R. Genadek.

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Genadek, K.R., Flood, S.M. & Roman, J.G. Trends in Spouses’ Shared Time in the United States, 1965–2012. Demography 53, 1801–1820 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-016-0512-8

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