Presenters:
Timothy Smeeding, Syracuse University
Aletha Huston, University of Texas
Cathleen D. Zick, University of Utah

Tim Smeeding: Time and Public Policy: Why do we care and What instruments are needed?

I. He will hit points that were not hard-hit today or yesterday. He began with two basic reasons we should collect data:

A. Factoids

B. To determine the determinants of time use (need modules). He thinks we learn more from looking at distributions than averages (a stratification focus).

C. The theme is heterogeneity.

II. Economic measurement

A. He wants to look at macro issues such as growth, CPI, productivity.

B. He wants to look at micro issues such as the distribution of real income (RI), where RI = MI (money income) - CW (costs of earnings) + NMW (non-market work)

C. Example: the hours-worked controversy:

1. Define "work." There is a difference between asking how many hours you worked vs. a time diary.

2. There are at least two methodologies — same population survey and reconciliation of points mentioned earlier.

3. Variance issues: DINKS (Dual Income-No Kids families) vs. stay-at-home mothers; single parents; early retirees.

D. Data needs: MI, CW and NMW

III. Broader issues in social policy arena (He will talk about care-giving, human capital and volunteerism.)

A. Care-giving

1. There is a disagreement in research over what the real estimate is of middle-age families providing elder care, 25%, 12% or none.

2. Single parents and child inputs, what gives?

3. Need estimate of child care, care-giving extent, burden, social security reform, etc.

B. Human capital: need estimates of time invested and real full returns

C. Volunteerism: Who is providing services for whom and to what effect, where, and why?

1. He posits that there is a big difference in volunteer work between helping a needy child to eat vs. planning a trip for a senior citizens group.

2. If neighborhoods sensibly build and use social and community capital, they can prevent crime and negative neighborhood outcome. We need to understand volunteerism.

3. Volunteerism and Youth.

4. Policy issue — need extend and determinants.

D. Intra-household allocations and decisions: Who does what and who gets what? Research has looked at and needs to revisit:

1. Bargaining models

2. Income distributions within households

3. Violence, care-giving, stress, child-rearing, location, child support/contact

4. Data needs: unit based surveys.

IV. Infrastructure Time

A. He thinks this is most important gap in research and data.

B. Now is a good time for fitting it into the national budget since monies are becoming available.

C. We need to know what sells vs. what is needed.

1. Need more than one instrument: The National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Academy of Sciences are both looking and could collaborate with the BLS and other funding/research groups. The BLS/BEA needs CPS, CEX, other.

2. Social Policy needs modeling, longitudinal, saturation by area, topic, and group (e.g., race or gender subgroups).

D. How can we do this?

1. Develop user-driven surveys by bringing together government, academics in many disciplines and other stakeholders for a long-term planning process.

2. Understand what is desirable (i.e., wish list) vs. what is feasible. The result is an available survey with a whole lot of user interest; even economists would use it!

E. International data process: Whatever is collected in the US needs to be available internationally. A data highway.

F. It is time for a social science infrastructure relief act.

Althea Huston: Implications for Child Policy:

1. What do we know about time use by children, and the distinction between them and adults?
2. How does time use relate to some child outcomes?
3. What are the policy implications of time-use data?

Longitudinal studies of child time with TV:

1. Used diaries and recall diaries to capture a 24 hour period.
2. Collected primary and secondary activities data when watching TV.
3. Asked what program was being watched.
4. Did three years of repeated measures for the same child

The Displacement Hypothesis: Something must decrease when TV watching increases. They found it depends on the type of programming being watched, whether intended for children or for a general audience. Play and watching TV often occur simultaneously and have a positive association. However, there is a trade-off between reading and watching general-audience TV programs.

Eighty minutes per day of secondary viewing of adult programs is done by 2-year-olds. This declines as age increases, since time with parents declines with age. This serves to remind us that time spent with parents is not always necessarily good time.

There are gender differences in time use. For example, at age 4, girls spend more time watching educational TV, reading, doing personal care, and chores. Boys spend more time playing video games (a computer-related activity that may give them an edge in technology).

When considering maternal employment, more than just whether or not the mother is present affects TV watching. Children in child-care centers watch less TV than those in home-based care.

By age 5, school-readiness was higher for children who watched more educational TV, but other negative outcomes increased with more general-audience TV viewing. It was found in one study that early exposure to educational TV predicts high school grades and some other outcomes, controlling for parents’ education and the birth order of the child.

In order to talk about child outcomes, we need children’s, not just adults’, time-use data. Much of children’s time is not spent with their parents. We need more information on parents’ work schedules. In addition to the number of hours they work, we should know if they work at non-standard times. We should use non-linear models because of diminishing marginal returns. We found children in self-care after school were okay except if they lived in a dangerous area. Therefore, we must consider the context.

Policy Implications:

1. We must make sure things are available for kids outside of school such as educational TV, out-of-school care and activities, and neighborhood safety.
2. We must push for parents’ work policies which improve parent accessibility, such as flexible hours, family leave, and allowing phone calls at work.
3. Often work requirements for poor women can complicate things. They are expected to get jobs, but the jobs they qualify for are often at odd hours.

Cathleen Zick: Family Policy, Parent-Child Time, and the Well-Being of Children. (She will be somewhat repetitive.)

Why focus on this topic?

1. Children are a valuable resource in our society, but are generally viewed as a vulnerable group.
2. Society devotes considerable energy to developing public policy that either directly or indirectly affects children’s welfare, but we do not know if the policies make a difference.
3. What we know about parent-child time to date is generally based on analyses of white, two-parent families during primary child-care time only. The data is old, mostly dated national samples.

What do we know about the correlates of parent-child time?

1. Child care is biggest component of housework for families with young children.
2. Mothers’ time spent in primary child care has increased on a per-child basis over much of this century.
3. Number of children, age of the youngest child, and parents’ education are consistent predictors of primary child-care time.
4. Employed mothers spend less time in primary child care than non-employed mothers, and the father’s time generally does not increase to compensate for her employment-induced decline.

What do we know about parent-child time other than primary child care?

1. There are passing references to secondary child-care time and/or non-care-related parent-child time in some studies (Hill 1985, Robinson and Godbey 1997), but few studies are directly on this topic.
2. However, she has some data to present from Bryant and Zick’s research findings (1996a, 1996b). Estimates of the average total hours spent by adults in child care shows a gender gap, with mothers spending more time. Parent-child shared time in non-care activities analyses indicated eating, housework and leisure are big chunks of time that are usually excluded by other analyses even though this may be human-capital building time. Research is missing part of the picture by excluding this parent-child time and the outcomes.

What do we know about parent-child time and child outcomes?

1. Studies of mothers’ employment (as a proxy of parent-child time) find mixed results.
2. Studies that link recall measures of specific types of parent-child time to child outcomes generally find positive associations.
3. However, diary based studies rarely speak to the child outcomes issue since they do not collect child-outcome data. This is a huge gap in the literature.

What is missing from the picture?

1. No data on 1990s, single-parent, or minority families.
2. Little information on time spent with children that is not primary child care.
3. Limited information on how parent-child time relates to child outcomes.
4. Very limited understanding of what role public policies may play in parent-child time.

Where should we go in terms of new data collection?

1. We need to do a better job of measuring the kinds of parent-child time that may affect outcomes. Developmental psychologists suggest that several aspects of parental involvement are important to child development, including interaction (more than direct child care), accessibility (more than primary time), and responsibility (more than direct contact time with children).
2. We need to think of parent-child time as being, in part, a form of human-capital investment. Family economists who promote this view argue for the importance of gathering data on parent-child time and parental opportunity costs, price of substitutes, meaningful child outcomes (over time, if possible), and recall measures of time spent in certain activities (if longitudinal data collection is not possible)

Where should we go in terms of assessing the impact of family policies?

1. The current family policy climate makes it necessary that we assess the impact of policies on family time use and children’s well-being because the design and administration of public policy is increasingly decentralized, funding is shrinking, and policy-makers typically have a short-run focus.
2. We need to evaluate the impact of both the policies targeted at directly altering parental time use and those that may indirectly impact parental time use.

Examples of public policies that may directly affect parental time use and child outcomes:

1. Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF)
2. Family and Medical Leave Act
3. Presumptive state guidelines regarding child visitation.

Examples of public policies that may indirectly affect parental time use and child outcomes:

1. Automatic child support withholding provisions of the 1998 Family Support Act
2. Earned income tax credit
3. Government subsidies for educational investments.

Conclusions

1. Research on the correlates of parent-child time and child well-being has grown in recent years.
2. But we have reached a critical juncture where continued progress is dependent on new data collection efforts.
3. Research in psychology and economics provide important insights regarding how such data collection should be structured, particularly if we want to use the data to evaluate the impact of public policies on family time use and children’s well-being.

Robert Michael: This conference has been a good first step, with international and interdisciplinary perspectives.

1. Regarding Huston’s discussion of time spent by very young children: We learn things from collection of this type of data. The gender differences are eerie, interesting, and provocative. There is little TV programming aimed at school-age children.
2. Regarding Zick’s presentation: We know there must be substitution if mom goes to work, but we would not know that some particular kinds of time with children increase while others decrease if it were not for the data.
3. We can learn things that we do not know from collecting data.

His own reflections: Let’s drop work leisure. The dichotomy it suggests is more misleading than helpful. It is unarguable that non-market time is productive. Considering the household’s command over resources, it is inappropriate to ignore how time affects households in poverty.

Non-market work has been out of sight and out of mind. Money is easier to measure and observe. But by not looking at time, we ignore half the cost of raising children. We only look at marginal returns to education in the labor market, but we ignore non-market returns. At the time of Gary Becker’s "Theory of the Allocation of Time," there was no national data on time use, and there is still none.

Group Discussion and Comments

Frank Stafford, University of Michigan: Question for Zick: I am trying to look at data for Scandinavia. There is a trend toward more investment in time. How does your data compare?

Zick: I have taken data from 1920s and 1930s and compared it with Michigan data for 1985 in the US and found that the amount of time spent by women on child care has not changed, despite the decline in fertility and rise in women’s employment.

Robert A. Pollak, Washington University: Why the notion that all time is productive? The issue I want to raise is: Are we trying to build a production-based index, which is the conceptual framework for national product accounts? The other side is a utility of welfare approach. People care how they spend their time. Time in various activities are direct arguments in one’s utility function. Are we moving over to a utility-based approach as we think about these indices?

The Becker paper on time allocation was very casual about the measurement of output. The case in that paper was the easy case, constant returns to scale and no joint production. Maybe we have made less progress because Becker did not tell us about the problems we have encountered.

What about volunteering? What about elder care? Someone is doing it, yet, in a large cross-section, we record very little of it — less than one hour per week.

John Robinson, University of Maryland: One reason for not including elder care in Robinson’s time-use survey is because the amount of time spent on this activity is relatively small. They got more general information on volunteerism. One problem is what level of activity people do report and how they subsume other activities into the one they reported.

Smeeding: But we really need to know what is going on here. It is important how much time is spent caring for elders. There is disagreement in different sources of data.

Robinson: You are just going to find that data in a cross-sectional study. You are running into a data collection problem.

Smeeding: I do not trust it. It should be a national policy to know what’s going on, who’s doing it, are women over-represented in elder care?

Robinson: I just think this is a kind of activity that is not reported.

Duncan Ironmonger, University of Melbourne: On the issue of child care, we need to make the unit of observation the child. As we can see from the different methodologies we have looked at, you get three to four times as much child care when you ask about secondary activities. So child-care reports are much higher in Australia. Different methodologies give us a very wide range. The methodology that we use has to be reliable so that we know what we are getting. If we asked elders about their time and who is caring for them, we might get a better measure.

Zick: To respond on child care — in 11 state surveys, in all cases except Connecticut, respondents had to proactively bring up secondary activities, else they were not recorded. In Connecticut, all time was coded as child care (secondary) as long as a child was at home.

Huston: This is not the issue. The issue is how the child reports the time they spend with adults — whether that is with parent or paid care-giver. To understand inputs into children, you have to look at it from the child’s perspective. Is some adult doing something with them actively? It does not have to be the parents.

Robin Douthitt, University of Wisconsin-Madison: When parents check on children from work via the telephone, this is not picked up by time-use data. The time parents spend making health-care appointments for children or for elders, or doing other primary-care activities, does not get counted as care time. This is a methodological issue of importance. These short events may be missed in data collection. When women are employed, they have a lot of hidden time in the paid-work domain to do things and be available for the child, contrary to reports that child care declines when mothers go to work. Children who live in single-parent households do more household chores, sometimes with the parent, and this can be "quality" time (e.g., going to the Laundromat).

Finally, an old-fashioned idea, time management which was looked at in old surveys found that in families there is a person who is the time manager for the family, and that is usually the woman. The stress of this management is high. Stress and quality of time do matter.

Michael Bittman, University of New South Wales: Comment on elder care — he agrees with Robinson that volunteering constitutes a tiny amount in time-use diaries. A marker you can use is the amount of time spent in personal care and grooming where spouses do this care for their partners to keep them out of institutional care. So these may be an intra- rather than inter-household exchange.

Thomas Juster, University of Michigan: If a woman is home and her child is next door playing, she cannot leave, but this is not really time use. This will never be picked up as child care by a time-use survey, and we would not want it to be. What you need to ask is, does this person have responsibility for children? However, this is not a use of time that respondents will see. This is not a time use in the conventional sense of the term.

William Nordhaus, Yale University: Do we want to think about valuing different units of time differently? Can we put a price tag or something like it on time use? He read a Swedish study that found Swedish women are not better off than American women in terms of time spent on housework and care-giving. However, Swedish women reported liking what they do more often than American women.

Michael Horrigan, BLS: When we are thinking about Robinson’s remarks, a lot of discussion centers around what you get out of time use and what you need in terms of context variables. This has important implications for designing surveys. Also, how often do we need to do time-use surveys? How often do you think the time-use distribution changes? What about adding modules to existing longitudinal studies and doing those in waves rather than annually? We need to think about where to put our resources.

Smeeding: He referenced Barbara Wolfe’s paper on the value of human capital in non-earnings related domains, which is similar to his paper. People are increasingly responsible for investment and health decisions, for example, and if you just look at income, you miss this return to human capital.

Huston: We could do assessments for children in strategic ways. After-school hours are an important time for children, especially primary and secondary school-aged children. Telephone calls at 6 p.m. about after-school time use would reveal a lot. Adolescent pregnancy (i.e., conception) and delinquency are most likely to occur between 3 and 7 p.m. In terms of policy, we need to look at those hours. Do children have other activity options during these times? Do they have time constraints, such as having to care for an elder? In terms of elder care, this may determine certain opportunities and constraints for the care-giver that may not show up in time use studies.

Michael: Nordhaus should have been here yesterday to get the answer to his question. Responding to Pollak: we have an output, but we do not know how to measure input. He disagrees with Ironmonger that we need to study productivity. We can study inputs instead.

Stephen Jenkens, University of Essex, provided the web address for the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)-Informal Economic Activities web site: www.esrc.ac.uk/ieaspec.htm

Session ended at scheduled time.

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