3.2 MEASURING UNPAID CARE WORK TIME
3.2.3 Accounting for simultaneous activities
observation process, and it is costly. The time-use diary that is filled in through an interview is advantageous if the respondent is illiterate or has low literacy, and it records simultaneous activities, but this method is costly, time consuming (which results in low participation rates), if there is no interview it require literacy skills and commitment from participants, and the
information obtained can be biased if the proper proportion and variety of days is not included.
While stylized questions are less costly, take less time because there are less questions (and relatedly a higher response rate), there are additional disadvantages. It is difficult to obtain information on simultaneous activities, order of activities, contextual information and number of episodes, and recall of a ‘usual’ day may result in overestimation. Moreover the stylized method requires more effort in terms of calculation on the part of respondents, and if a lot of activities are asked about respondent and interviewer fatigue may result.
Finally, Kes and Swaminathan (2006) and Blackden and Wodon (2006) highlight the need for research on the impact of serious illness such as HIV/AIDS on women’s time allocation patterns.
One study of 100 households in Ethiopia (see Baryoh, 1994, as cited in Bollinger, Stover, &
Seyoum, 1999, p. 5) found that the workload of women who either had HIV/AIDS or lived in a household that was affected by HIV/AIDS or both, was significantly different from the workload of women who lived in households that were neither afflicted nor affected. The most time-
consuming activity for women in HIV/AIDS affected households was nursing at home (50.2 hours per week on average). Moreover, women in HIV/AIDS affected households spent substantially less time on child care when compared with women in non-HIV/AIDS affected households, and much less time on agricultural activities when compared with women in non- HIV/AIDS affected households.
undertaken at the same time by one individual. For instance, this could involve cooking a meal while at the same time looking after a child. Pollak (1999, as cited in Budlender et al. 2001) notes an interesting distinction between types of simultaneous activities. ‘Parallel activities’ include, for instance, driving a car and listening to the radio. The second type of simultaneous activity involves bearing responsibility for the care of another person at the same time as doing something else (‘on-call activities’). A person doing one of these on-call activities can do something else at the same time “but the range of activities that are compatible with being on call is constrained in terms of location and is limited to activities that must be interrupted” (Pollak, 1999, p.8, as cited in Budlender et al., 2001, p. 22).
According to Budlender (2006) simultaneous activities must be recorded and analysed if unpaid care work and especially care work more narrowly defined is to be accurately recorded.
Ironmonger (2003) shows that counting one activity time only is a gross underestimate of the time spent by adults on child care. Since more simultaneous work is carried out by women than men, an undercounting of women’s work will result if simultaneous activities are not counted (Beneria, 1992; Budlender, 2002).
Some time use surveys do not attempt to capture simultaneous activities, while others attempt to do so but often experience difficulties in obtaining accurate and comprehensive measures
(Budlender, 2006). Even where methods allow for multiple activities, these activities may not be remembered by respondents. According to Budlender (2002) research has shown that women do not remember to mention all the child care work they do. Another difficulty with recording simultaneous activities is that some respondents might include them in their estimates while others will think only of one of two or more activities they were doing at one time, in trying to add together the different bits of their day (Budlender, 2006).
There are various options in measuring simultaneous time-use. When two activities are reported for the same period, one option is to allocate the same amount of time to each activity as the time taken for the simultaneous activity. If, for example, a person spends one hour cleaning and, at the same time, one hour caring for children, it could be counted as one hour spent cleaning and one
hour spent in child care. The drawback to this approach is that it would result in double-counting of the time and would not satisfy the constraint that a day has only 24 hours (Ironmonger, 2003;
United Nations, 2005). A second option, suggested by Ironmonger (2003), is to ascribe 30 minutes to cleaning and 30 minutes to child care. But this also does not seem to be a satisfactory way to account for the time spent, since 30 minutes was not solely spent cleaning and 30 minutes was not solely spent caring for children. While the United Nations (2005) suggests as a third option counting only one of the simultaneous activities, this means that no simultaneous time is counted.
An alternative entails regarding the activities not as two separate activities but as joint activities.
For example, instead of ‘cleaning’ (one activity) and ‘caring for children’ (another activity),
‘cleaning and caring for children’ is seen as an activity on its own. This approach does not entail double-counting and all activities that are counted sum to 24 hours in a day or 168 hours in a week (Ironmonger, 2003). However, while this approach may be conceptually appealing, the United Nations (2005) point out that it may lead to an enormous number of activity categories, which may be difficult to deal with. As alternatives they propose two options. With the first option the time spent on solo activities is allocated as a proportion of time for joint activities.
With the second option – which involves valuing time – the time spent in joint activities is divided by the value of the outputs produced by the time. For example, if a person is both cooking and looking after a child at the same time, and the value of cooking is R15 per hour and the value of looking after a child is R5 per hour, then an hour of simultaneously cooking and looking after a child would be allocated as 45 minutes of cooking and 15 minutes of looking after a child.
Despite these approaches, Budlender concludes that “current methods, even where provision is made for simultaneous activities, almost certainly produce less than comprehensive results”, and that more research and experimentation is required in this area (Budlender, 2006, p. 52).