3.2 MEASURING UNPAID CARE WORK TIME
3.2.2 Methods for measuring time-use
approach is that through observation the activities themselves are likely to be altered (Juster, 1985). This method is also very researcher-intensive and costly because the researcher can only follow and observe one person at a time (Budlender, 2002). A further problem is that an observer could make inferences about the purpose or motivation of the activity which would be better made by the person or persons being observed (Juster, 1985). For these reasons observation is not widely used to gather time-use information.
Time allocation may also be measured through a series of stylized questions, which inquire about the frequency with which a certain activity is undertaken, and the duration of the activity (Juster, 1985; United Nations, 2005). For example, ‘how often is the person given food in a day?’, and then, ‘how long does feeding the person take at each of these times?’ This method is normally used in a questionnaire, among a series of other questions (Budlender, 2002). There are a number of variants of the stylized method which Budlender (2002, citing INSTRAW, 1995) describes.
There are two central approaches that fall within the stylized method. The first involves targeting only specific activities (the approach adopted in this study). The second attempts to provide for all possible activities and the total time is constrained to 24 hours in a day (Budlender, 2006;
United Nations, 2005). The stylized method is generally only able to provide information on one of two or more activities undertaken at one time, as well as the duration of activities. It does not provide information on simultaneous activities, the chronological order of activities, the number of episodes per activity nor contextual information (United Nations, 2005).
The third method is the use of time diaries. A time diary collects time allocation data in a
structured way and usually involves a short recall period (Van den Berg & Spauwen, 2006). The respondent describes each activity for a specified period of time. Budlender (2006) notes that in some cases a pre-defined set of activities is provided from which the respondent must choose for every time slot in the day, and in other instances the respondent describes what he/she did for each part of the day and codes are assigned afterwards. In some cases, the diary will have time slots along the side or top of the page against which the activities must be recorded. In other cases, the respondent just names each activity, with a beginning and ending time. Time diaries
may be filled out by the respondent or he/she may report activities to an interviewer who then records the information. There are two main types of time diaries. In the ‘yesterday’ diary, the respondent is asked what he/she did for each period of the previous day. In the ‘today’ diary, the respondent is given a diary to fill during a specified day in the future (Budlender, 2002; Juster, 1985).
Juster (1985) and Kan (2006) broadly outline the advantages of the time diary method: all activities are covered for a defined span of time and therefore it is comprehensive; the time diary has a built-in control check in that an external control variable is available (that is, 24 hours for recording activities over a day); if there is no list of activities built in, respondents report activities in self-descriptive terms which can then be coded according to uniform coding decisions.
The ‘yesterday’ diary can be filled in through an interview, which is helpful if respondents are illiterate or find writing and reading difficult. However, it is problematic if the person does not remember well what they did on the previous day. In this way the ‘today’ diary is advantageous, although in practice most respondents do not record activities as they do them. Further
disadvantages are that the ‘today’ diary requires literacy skills and commitment from the respondent to carry the diary with them during the prescribed day and remember to write things down (Budlender, 2002).
Disadvantages to the time diary method in general include the fact that seasonal activity patterns vary and daily time-uses vary vastly depending on whether the day is a week day, a weekend day, a day spent away from home, etc. This is relevant to care work to the extent that the carer or other household members are employed, in which case it would tend to differ by day of the week.
Another disadvantage is that if the data collection period does not include the proper proportion of the various types of days, the estimates are likely to be biased. Also, if activities are measured over long periods of time difficulties are experienced. It is far preferable to ask people to record activities using a short and recent time span such as the last 24 hours (Juster, 1985). Moreover, the time diary is time consuming for respondents – and thereby places an additional burden on
them which is not desirable when the burden of care work is already high. Low participation rates are also common with this method, partly because it is time consuming. In general it is a costly method to use in financial terms.
According to Budlender (2006), the attraction of stylized approaches is that they involve far fewer questions and require less time than a time diary, and the data produced are easier to
analyse. In addition, obtaining information using stylized questions costs less than the time diary.
With regard to the stylized method, in principle it may be possible to construct a lengthy list of activities that would comprise all the activities of households and thereby create a set of estimates that is fully comprehensive. However this may be somewhat arduous for respondents to complete (Juster, 1985). As Budlender (2006, p. 52) notes: “there must inevitably come a point where the number of activities for which the respondent is prompted results in fatigue on the part of
respondent and fieldworker, and thus poor quality data”. As it is, stylized estimates require more effort in calculating on the part of respondents than do time diaries (Kan, 2006). Moreover, where unpaid care work activities are done intermittently throughout the day it may be difficult for respondents to estimate these separate times and arrive at a total time that is accurate (Budlender, 2006; Van den Berg & Spauwen, 2006). Therefore, the reliability of the estimate will depend on the type of activity undertaken. Making meals may be easy to estimate time for because there are standard times for meals, but keeping an eye on an ill person may be more difficult (Budlender, 2002). Budlender (2006) and the United Nations (2005) note that respondents tend to under- report activities that are considered less desirable (for instance, relaxing) and over-report activities that are regarded as desirable (for instance, tending to the person in need of care).
Stylized approaches are also preferable for specific, short time periods (such as yesterday), rather than asking about usual activities over a day or week, for instance (United Nations, 2005),
although the latter tends to be how they are generally used. In this respect, Juster and Stafford (1985) conclude that the main bias of stylized questions when asking about ‘usual’ activities is that respondents tend to recall days when the activity asked about was particularly prominent, and treat that as an average day, thereby resulting in overestimation. In fact, Kan (2006) notes that
stylized estimates tend to produce total time greater than 168 hours (24 X 7) a week. One
disadvantage of stylized questions is that there is no way of checking whether the answers ‘make sense’, in terms of whether they add up to 24 hours (Budlender, 2002), since this is (usually) not a prerequisite (Van den Berg & Spauwen, 2006).
Juster (1985) believes that time allocation data obtained using the stylized activity mode is only satisfactory for sets of activities that are performed with high frequency – such as on a daily basis – and that do not vary greatly in the amounts of time involved. In contrast, Fast and Frederick (1999) and the United Nations (2005) argue that stylized methods provide better estimates of time spent on irregular, infrequent and episodic activities than the time diary. According to Kan (2006) the gap in estimates from the time diary and from stylized questions should be larger when the respondent has irregular patterns of participation in an activity. Hence, women should report hours spent in caregiving more accurately than men because they undertake caregiving more than men. Therefore the discrepancy in estimates could vary across different groups depending on the levels of their usual participation in an activity.
A problem specific to the measurement of unpaid care work is the separation between ‘normal’
housework that somebody does anyway and additional housework that is due to the care demands of the cared-for. Van den Berg and Spauwen (2006) mention that respondents find it difficult to make a distinction between ‘normal’ housework and ‘informal care’ housework when completing the stylized method. Similarly, Netten (1993) indicates that caregivers find it impossible to estimate what is typical. She cites a study of ten local authorities in England in which a number of caregivers were able to identify tasks but not the amount of time spent on these tasks. The United Nations (2005) notes that for activities that take place daily it will probably be easier to estimate what is ‘typical’, than activities that occur infrequently.
A further shortcoming of stylized approaches is that they do not provide information on the time of the day that different activities take place (Budlender, 2006; United Nations, 2005). This makes it difficult to analyse the interaction between economic activities and unpaid care work, and it also prevents the use of contextual variables, such as location, and travel. The stylized
method is likely not to count, or to undercount, travel time when reporting time spent on care, and here explicit attention needs to be paid to recording travel information (Budlender, 2006).
Similarly, another limitation of stylized approaches relates to the definition and boundaries of care work. Where respondents are asked in the stylized approach how much time they spent on a particular activity, their responses will depend on what they understand the activity to include (Budlender, 2006). If, for example, they are asked how much time they spent looking after an ill person, some might include the time spent travelling to and from a health facility with the person while others might not. Simultaneous activities add a further complication in that some
respondents might include them in their estimates while others may reflect only one of two activities undertaken at one time. It is therefore important that questions be stated in such a way that respondents understand the boundaries of the activities that they must report on (United Nations, 2005).
With the diary approach undertaken as an interview the person describes the activities in their own words, and the coder can then decide whether activity time should be counted as care work or not (Budlender, 2006). According to Folbre (2006), however, the stylized method may be superior to a diary-based method in one important aspect. She argues that activity-based surveys should be supplemented by more stylized questions regarding care responsibilities in order to get at the non-activity-based caregiving that occurs, and which is usually understated in
measurements of unpaid caregiving time-use.
As with Juster and Stafford (1985), van den Berg and Spauwen (2006) also point to the problem of overestimation with stylized questions, where respondents report time-use that adds up to more than 168 hours per week. However, they note that activities that are usually performed in
combination with other activities tend to contribute to this outcome. If simultaneous activities are taken into account when stylized questions are asked, these authors consider this method to be a valid tool to measure time spent on unpaid care work. According to the United Nations (2005), while stylized methods typically overestimate time-use an exception occurs if the length of the retrospective time horizon is long (for instance, six months or a year). Juster and Stafford (1991)
add to this if events take place relatively rarely and if activities lack salience (for instance, buying a bucket for the person to use to go to the toilet, that occurs only once). Similarly, Folbre (2006) describes how time devoted to the care of sick and disabled people is seriously understated by activity-based measures – she cites Australian time-use data and research on the impact of HIV/AIDS on time-use as evidence for this claim.
Kan (2006) describes research that shows that the size of the gap between diary and stylized estimates depends on the gender of respondents, the total household work hours, education and other socio-economic variables. Kan compares stylized estimates and time diary estimates of housework time collected from the same respondents and using comparable time frames. She finds that the gap between estimates is generally smaller with regard to women – although some other authors have found the opposite to be true (see Kan, 2006, p. 3). Kan notes that women generally report their housework hours more accurately than men, and that the difference
between the two types of estimates is less than five percent for women. Moreover, for women the gap in estimates is associated with the amount of housework undertaken as a simultaneous activity, and the level of irregularity in housework hours. Kan finds that if dependent children are present the gap in estimates is inflated for men and women. By deduction the same may well be true for dependent adults who are ill. However, overall Kan finds systematic errors in stylized housework time estimates.
In terms of ‘output’ some of the drawbacks of the stylized method are that both validity and reliability are relatively low. Kan (2006) observes simply that inaccuracy in respondents’
estimations also points to the limitations of the human memory. Kan and van den Berg and Spauwen (2006) highlight the problem of validity that is presented by the retrospective way of questioning and that may lead to recall bias, a drawback that also applies to time diaries that are retrospective. Van den Berg and Spauwen tested the stylized method for test-retest reliability and found that it was unstable over time, but emphasize that this could be due to learning effects from completing a time diary, which was also part of their study.
Nevertheless, there seems to be consensus among some authors that the time diary is the method of choice. Both Juster (1985) and Juster and Stafford (1991) expound the virtues of the time diary and INSTRAW (1995, p. 69, as cited in Budlender, 2002) describes this method as the “tool of preference” because it avoids some of the problems associated with the other methods. Juster and Stafford (1991, p. 473) recommend time diaries be “administered to a sample of individuals in a population and organized in such a way as to provide a probability sample of all types of days and of the different seasons of the year”. However, if literacy levels are low, as is the case in many developing countries, despite being the method of choice the time diary may not be the best method to use. In fact decisions as to which method to apply for time use surveys in various developing countries have been centrally based on data quality concerns that relate to the literacy level of respondents, and in these contexts Kes and Swaminarathan (2006) propose the use of illustrated survey materials or interviewer-administered surveys, and the United Nations (2005) suggest the stylized method as being preferable to a leave-behind time diary.
Ultimately though, in their guide to producing time-use statistics, the United Nations (2005) point out that arriving at an appropriate design for producing statistics on time-use requires the
balancing of objectives and resources. Similarly, Kan (2006) notes that in collecting time-use estimates there is usually a trade off between minimizing the burden on respondents and
achieving a high response rate. Stylized estimates are cheaper to collect than diary estimates and less demanding on respondents, and there is therefore usually a higher response rate with this method compared with the more demanding time diary method, which results in a lower response rate. In fact, Kan (2006) and van den Berg and Spauwen (2006) argue that data from stylized questions should not be abandoned but made better use of by applying cautiousness in the
interpretation of results. As something of a ‘mid-way’ solution, Kan suggests combining the diary and the survey type approaches, and having a sub-sample of the survey type respondents record time diaries.
In the South African context there are particular advantages and disadvantages that apply to each time-use method. While observation does not require literacy or having a western concept of time, and it can pick up on simultaneous activities, activities can be altered through the
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.