Household Time Budgets

Abstract

This chapter establishes the quantitative base for studying the trade-off between work and leisure by analysing the household budget of time in detail. It is an analysis of how much time people spend working, travelling to work, eating and sleeping, and how much time they have for leisure after work and on their days off. In particular, a substantial part of the analysis deals with sex differences. It will be seen that time pressures weigh very heavily on Soviet citizens. This is especially true for women whose options on a daily basis are extremely limited because of their dual roles as worker and homemaker. This information is collected using a standard methodology that has been used for a long time in the Soviet Union: simply asking people how much time they devote to each of these activities and viewing the results as the household’s or individual’s time budget. These time budget studies represent the West’s primary source of knowledge on how Soviet citizens spend their lives.