Abstract
This paper examines trends in the patterns of time use of older adults, from the 1970s to the 1990s. Using data from time use surveys, trends in three countries are examined: the United States, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands. As expected, results suggest that time spent on paid work has decreased over time for men (but not in the United States), especially at older ages. For older men, time that used to be allocated to paid work appears to have been reallocated to housework and leisure activities. For women, an opposite trend was observed with an increase in time devoted to paid work and a decrease in time devoted to housework. Women still devote more time to housework than men, but the gender gap has been reduced in all countries. Results also suggest that men and women aged 65–74 years old have led a more active life since the 1970s. Results for other seniors are mixed and highly depend on the definition of active life.
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Notes
- 1.
From the title of Ausubel and Grubbler (1999).
- 2.
From the title of Robinson et al. (1997).
- 3.
One reason why we know relatively little about the patterns of time use of older adults, as opposed to younger adults, is that the earlier harmonized version of the Multinational Time Use Archive (MTUS) was restricted to the population age 20 to 59 years old, even though the original time use surveys covered a wider age range. We are currently expanding this archive. The results presented in this paper are among the first ones based on this expanded archive. For details, see the web site of the MTUS: http://www.timeuse.org/mtus/
- 4.
This new version of the dataset is now available to researchers. Information may be obtained on the MTUS website: http://www.timeuse.org/mtus/
- 5.
A time-use survey was carried out in 1965 in the United States. This survey is not analyzed in this paper because the sample is restricted to households in which there is at least one member actively involved in the labour force. This nature of the sample thus creates a bias towards employed people and is therefore not comparable to the other surveys.
- 6.
The weights also control for sampling issues such as non-response and over-sampling. It should be noted that although the weights ensure an equal representation of every day of the week at the aggregate level for the total sample, some unequal sampling of the days of the week are observed for smaller sub-groups of the respondents (even after weighting).
- 7.
It should be noted, that even if data were collected for the 12 months of the year, we are likely missing major holidays when respondents were not available to keep their diary.
- 8.
It should be noted that we do not test for the statistical significance of the historical trends. Our analysis is purely descriptive. In future analyses we intend to adopt a different approach.
- 9.
Although these results may capture a genuine trend, we also suspect a problem of incomparability amongst the British surveys (see our earlier comment to this effect).
- 10.
In the analysis, we also computed separate figures for time devoted to religious activities. Once averaged over the 7 days of the week, the figures are however too small to reveal any trend.
- 11.
Note that reading books is included in hobbies. It is assumed here that reading books for education purposes would have been reported by respondents as education-related.
- 12.
The time use surveys routinely collect data on with whom each of the activities is carried out (alone, with family members, with others, etc). The harmonized version of the time use surveys currently does not contain this information even though it is present in most of the original (non-harmonized) surveys. This is something that we intend to exploit in future analyses.
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Acknowledgements
This paper benefited from a grant from the OECD. We are grateful to Peter Hicks for his support and Jenny Gierveld for her comments. This paper is part of a larger research project on the patterns of time use of older people and is supported by a strategic research grant from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. We also thank our research assistants at the University of Calgary: Charlemaigne, Cara, Cori, Leslie, Monica and Tyler. We greatly appreciate their endless hours of data mining! Access to the data was granted to us by the Multinational Time Use Study. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual conference of the International Association of Gerontology (Vancouver, July 2001).
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Gauthier, A.H., Smeeding, T.M. (2010). Historical Trends in the Patterns of Time Use of Older Adults. In: Tuljapurkar, S., Ogawa, N., Gauthier, A. (eds) Ageing in Advanced Industrial States. International Studies in Population, vol 8. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-3553-0_12
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