Abstract
This paper investigates the effect of ethnicity on time spent on secondary household production, work and leisure activities employing the 2000 UK Time Use Survey. We find that, unconditionally, white females manage to “stretch” their time the most by almost four additional hours per day and non-white men “stretch” their time the least. The three secondary activities most often combined with other (primary) activities in terms of time spent on them are social activities including resting, passive leisure and childcare. Regression results indicate that non-white ethnic minorities engage less in multitasking than whites, with Pakistani and Bangladeshi males spending the least time on total secondary activities. There also exists a significant ethnicity gap for secondary housework activities and for both males and females, although females in general engage more in multitasking. The effect is heterogeneous across different sub-groups. We review several potential interpretations and discuss whether these differences in behavior may relate, among other, to opportunity costs of time, different preferences and tastes of ethnic minorities, integration experience, family composition and household productivity.
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Notes
See Hamermesh and Lee (2007) for a theoretical model of time stress and empirical evidence on the determinants of time stress for several countries. The authors note that “anything that makes the household more efficient in its home activities can be viewed as equivalent to an increase in effective time and should reduce the extent to which the time constraint binds” (p. 375).
Secondary activities were recorded for all primary activities, with the exception of sleep, market work or study as a primary activity. In the case of labor market work, however, if the primary activity was lunch or coffee breaks during work, secondary activities were recorded.
Note that here we pool together diaries for a weekday and a weekend day because of the small differences between the activities of interest. In the econometric analysis below, however, we distinguish between a weekday and a weekend day.
We broadly follow Floro and Miles (2003) and Zaiceva and Zimmermann (2007) when defining these activities. “Labour market work and related” category includes time spent in main job, second job and other activities related to employment, such as lunch breaks. “Food management” (food preparation, dish washing etc.), “childcare” (feeding, teaching, playing, talking, supervising the child etc.) and “shopping” are household work activities, which include in addition “other domestic work” (household upkeep, gardening and pet care, care for textiles, construction and repair, household management etc.). “Religious activities” and “other volunteer/participatory activities” (organizational work, informal help to other households etc.) form the group “volunteer work and meetings”. “Active leisure” includes sports and outdoor activities, hobbies and games, such as performing arts, collecting, playing games etc. “Passive leisure” includes watching TV, reading, listening to the radio or recordings and other mass media activities. “Social activities and resting” covers socializing with others (including by phone), visiting other people, museums, cinemas, theatres, libraries etc. as well as having a time out. “Education” activities include studies at school or university, courses or free time study. “Sleeping, eating, personal care” include also washing, dressing and other personal care activities. Travel time is included in the “other” category. Note that equal weight is given to primary and secondary activities throughout the analysis.
For example, the tabulations of household income indicate that, as expected, the proportion of non-whites in the lowest income group is larger than the corresponding proportion of whites and is even larger for non-white non-citizens; whilst the proportion of non-whites in the highest income group is smaller than that of whites.
We have also analyzed the so-called “work” activities (labor market work, household work and family care, and volunteer work and meetings) as in Floro and Miles (2003). The results were qualitatively the same, with the only difference for age effect: it became insignificant in the equation for weekdays.
We have also experimented with estimating OLS and censored least absolute deviations (CLAD) models and the results were qualitatively the same: non-white ethnic minorities spend significantly less time on secondary activities.
Ideally, we would need to have each spouse’s contribution to the total household income, i.e. earnings. However, linking spouses and keeping only those with valid earnings information reduces the sample even more, which becomes prohibitively small for the analysis of non-white minorities. Nevertheless, we do experiment with individual earnings below.
In the dataset there is also another small category of ethnic minorities called “none of these”. Since it was not possible to determine which ethnic group to assign these minorities to, we have excluded this category from our main analysis. Including it into the non-white group did not change the results: the effect was negative and significant for the non-whites. The effect on all secondary activities for different ethnicities (vis-à-vis Table 4) remained robust and almost unchanged and the effect for “other” ethnic minorities was negative and significant (with the exception for males’ weekend diaries). The magnitude of this effect for men was smaller in absolute terms than the one for Pakistani/Bangladeshi and Indians; while for women weekend diaries it was larger than the effect for Blacks and Pakistani/Bangladeshi and it was almost the same as the effect for Pakistani/Bangladeshi for women weekday diaries.
The regressors include gender, ethnicity, age and its square as a proxy for labor market experience, marital status, number of children and adults, education levels and region fixed effects.
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We would like to thank the Editor and two anonymous referees for helpful comments and suggestions.
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Zaiceva, A., Zimmermann, K.F. Do ethnic minorities “stretch” their time? UK household evidence on multitasking. Rev Econ Household 9, 181–206 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11150-010-9103-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11150-010-9103-4