Re: gender & work time
On Apr 20, 2007, at 3:17 PM, Gar Lipow wrote:
On 4/20/07, Doug Henwood dhenwood@panix.com wrote:
This is based on time-diaries, not self-reports:
Well a time diary is a form of self-reporting, but that is semantics. More to the point I doubt time diaries are filled out as the work is done. I filled out an arbitron diary once, and I did not track my listening as it happened, but reconstructed from memory they day before mailing it. Anecdotal, but I wonder if diaries really differ significantly from other forms of self-reporting.
The paper addresses that:
No matter how extensive a set of codes is, each survey will have a
different way of coding and aggregating what might seem like the
same activity to an observer. Time diaries have the virtue of
forcing respondents to provide a time allocation that adds to 24
hours in a day. Also, unlike retrospective data about last week’s
or even last year’s time spent working, while the time-diary
information is necessarily based on recall, the recall period is
only one day. The shorter recall period and the implicit time- budget constraint suggest that information on market work from time
diaries is likely to be more reliable than the recall data on time
use from standard household surveys; and, of course, time diaries
provide information on non-market activities that is unavailable
from labor-force surveys.