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The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the combined use of time-use diaries and interviews to get a fuller understanding of how people use their time, the factors that influence their time use, and their subjective perceptions of their time pressures. This paper focuses on how the methodology influenced the findings.

Participants kept a diary of their time use for one week and then participated in interviews to discuss their time use.

While the diaries yielded numerical data about participants’ time use, the interviews revealed the reasons behind their time choices. The complexity of Pakistani food preparation and the presence of in-laws in the home emerged as major factors. All participants expressed frustration with their time poverty.

This was a small pilot study limited to eight participants.

This method gives researchers a more powerful tool for understanding not only how people use their time, but the social, cultural and economic forces behind their choices.

Time poverty creates social inequities, especially among women and marginalized people. The methodology presented allows participants to have a voice in time-use studies and can help policy makers create policies that correct time poverty for disadvantaged groups.

This paper illustrates the usefulness of combining two existing methods for time-use studies in a new way for more powerful results.

This paper summarizes a time-diary study of a Canadian public library that estimated the hours spent by patrons using library facilities and circulated collections during a month. The purpose of this paper is to convert conventional library statistics into a metric more understandable to external stakeholder groups: time.

Paper-based time-diaries collected data on the patron use of circulated library materials throughout the loans cycle and exit surveys measured the duration of branch visits. This data along with gate and circulation statistics were used to estimate hours of patron residency in library branches and the time spent consuming borrowed materials.

Patrons used the services, facilities and collections of Prince George Public Library’s Bob Harkins branch for an estimated 182,000 hours during August 2013. Over 90 per cent of use occurred offsite through the consumption of circulated materials by diarists and secondary use of borrowed items by their families and friends.

Conventional statistics understate the utilization of public library resources as most of their use occurs outside the library branches, a different usage pattern than for other municipal services. This study suggests that all library use is potentially measurable using a single metric, hours of patron use. The value of a time metric, once methodologically sound, is its usefulness as a measure of library performance and its convertibility in dollars of direct value using contingent valuation methodology.

Time-diary methodology collected patron time-use data on public library circulated materials. The paper demonstrates the potential of patron time-use as a metric of library performance. Hours of patron use appear convertible into dollars of benefit using contingent valuation research.

This paper reports several findings of a survey on children aged 5–13¹ years focusing on their daily lives. The aim was to test the assumption, claimed in New Childhood Sociology, that children are a generational group so strictly dependent on adult society that they have little autonomy in their daily behaviour. Moreover, although they are a social group that is different from that of adults, they are so diversified internally that it seems more appropriate to speak of diversified childhoods (James, Jenks & Prout, 1998; James & Prout, 1990; Qvortrup, 1991; Hengst & Zeiher, 2004). Our first objective in this paper was therefore to improve the rather scarce knowledge of children's everyday lives in post-industrial Western societies and then to analyse to what extent these were connected with those of adults. Finally, we wished to detect the degree and patterns of differences in the children's lifestyles.

The purpose of this paper is to study the allocation of time to paid work, unpaid work and non-work by women in Britain in 1998-1999. To infer the labor supply from the other time-use expressions.

The paper uses weekly diary data to estimate the unpaid work and non-work functions. It infers the (residual) paid work expression. As the latter is recovered from uncensored regressions, it makes direct use of the complete set of observations. Hence, it contains more information than the conventional labor supply functions that are estimated from the data obtained from paid work participants via the Tobit and Heckit or selection-bias correction (SBC) techniques.

The women surveyed generally allocated 69 percent of their time toward non-work, 18 percent to unpaid work, and 13 percent to paid work. The non-work function is dominated by the autonomous component, and all three functions depend on subjects’ age, wage, non-labor income, household composition, the unpaid work contributions of adult relatives and region of residence. The unpaid work and non-work functions are more consistent with the SBC rather than the Tobit version of the labor supply. Moreover, the Tobit predicts unrealistic paid work allocations for women engaging in very little non-work.

The unpaid work and non-work functions are regressed separately, as often the case in the literature. Their consideration within a seemingly unrelated regression framework necessitates a reduction in the number of observations to match those considered in the Tobit and SBC versions of the labor supply. Nuances may arise when the time reported in the diaries does not add up to 24 daily hours for all respondents. Knowledge of the recovered regional, age, household member and other effects on women time allocation might had come handy to economic development authorities who sought to attract women out of the household into market production, and from part-time to full-time employment in the context of the 2000-2010 Lisbon Strategy. Similar lessons may be valid today.

The data set derives from a survey that has not been used before. It relies on week-long diaries in order to avoid the occurrence of many zeros in a good number of activities (which is the norm in short diaries), and to ensure the study of a censored time-use function through its uncensored complements. The findings are compared to those of a weekly diary survey conducted in 1987 that solicited similar information. Hence, the study fills a gap in time-use analysis. Identifying the factors which influence the number of hours that women engage in work (both paid and unpaid) and non-work is useful for economic policy purposes. The study exposes a limitation in the conventional estimation of the labor supply which, in turn, casts doubt on the reliability of empirical results for policy making.

The burnout, stress, and work-life balance challenges faced by teachers have received renewed interest due to the myriad disruptions and changes to K-12 schooling brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic. Even prior to the pandemic, relatively little was known about teachers' time use outside of the classroom, the blurring of work and home boundaries, and how teachers compare to similar professionals in these regards. We use daily time-diary data from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) for 3,168 teachers and 1,886 professionals in similarly prosocial occupations from 2003 to 2019 to examine occupational differences in time use. Compared to observationally similar non-teachers, teachers spend significantly more time volunteering at their workplace and completing work outside the workplace during the school year. On average, teachers spend 19 more minutes working outside of the workplace on weekdays than observably similar non-teachers and 38 more minutes on weekends. The weekend disparity is particularly large among secondary school teachers. This suggests that before the widespread switch to online and hybrid learning necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic, teachers were already navigating blurrier work-life boundaries than their counterparts in similar professions. This has important implications for teacher turnover and for the effectiveness and wellness of teachers who remain in the profession.

We investigate how household disadvantage affects the time use of 15–18 year olds using 2003–2006 data from the American Time Use Survey. Applying competing-risk hazard models, we distinguish between the incidence and duration of activities and incorporate the daily time constraint. We find that teens living in disadvantaged households spend less time in nonclassroom educational activities than other teens. Girls spend some of this time in work activities, suggesting that they are taking on adult roles. However, we find more evidence of substitution into unsupervised activities, suggesting that it may be less-structured environments that reduce educational investment.

Relationships have changed dramatically in the last 50 years. Fewer couples are marrying, more are cohabiting. Reasons for this shift include more attractive labor market opportunities for women and changing social norms, but the shift may have consequences of its own. A number of models predict that those cohabiting will specialize less than those marrying. Panel data on time use – particularly housework time – as well as on the degree of specialization in more narrowly defined household tasks from the 2001–2019 waves of the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey are used to test this prediction.

The time use data for men provides only limited supporting evidence for specialization. The results for women are much stronger. Women who marry without first cohabiting increase their reported housework time more than those who enter cohabitations (by 3.7 hours versus 1.2 hours). The latter generally make up a third of the difference if they do marry. Expanding the analysis to other uses of time yields some further evidence of specialization.

Survey responses on the degree of specialization are more informative. The raw data show substantial intrahousehold specialization and further analysis reveals that on average married couples specialize more than cohabiting couples. Adding couple-specific fixed effects reveals that specialization increases when cohabiting couples marry. Interestingly, there does not appear to be a substantial tradeoff between tasks; partners who report specializing more on one task are more likely to report specializing on other tasks as well. Given the important roles couples have in family formation and the labor market, it is important to understand this intrahousehold behavior.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the impact of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic on participation and time allocated to work from home (WFH) by ethnic/racial group.

The authors employ USA time-use data [American Time Use Survey (ATUS)] for the 2017–2020 period and a parametric approach in their analysis.

Estimates show that the time allocated to WFH increased during COVID-19, especially for women. This increase is likely driven by more workers shifting to WFH (higher participation) rather than by longer hours worked by those who already teleworked. The authors also find relevant differences in the impact of COVID-19 on WFH by ethnic/racial group. Among ethnic/racial groups, only Asians increased WFH compared to White Americans. Within this ethnic group, the authors find significant differences across genders. Asian men increased participation in WFH, whereas Asian women increased both participation and hours worked, compared to White American women. Differences in this racial/ethnic group could be explained by previous research, which demonstrates a higher ability of Asians to perform job tasks remotely. However, this finding could also be attributed to an increase in discrimination during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This paper contributes to the recent and limited literature exploring the heterogeneous impact of COVID-19 on participation and time allocated to WFH by ethnic/racial group. Understanding the mechanisms driving vulnerable populations' abilities to work during socioeconomic downturns is of high policy importance.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the implementation of lean methodology to reduce the turnaround time (TAT) of a clinical laboratory in a super speciality hospital. Delays in report delivery lead to delayed diagnosis increased waiting time and decreased customer satisfaction. The reduction in TAT will lead to increased patient satisfaction, quality of care, employee satisfaction and ultimately the hospital’s revenue.

The generic causes resulting in increasing TAT of clinical laboratories were identified using lean tools and techniques such as value stream mapping (VSM), Gemba, Pareto Analysis and Root Cause Analysis. VSM was used as a tool to analyze the current state of the process and further VSM was used to design the future state with suggestions for process improvements.

This study identified 12 major non-value added factors for the hematology laboratory and 5 major non-value added factors for the biochemistry lab which were acting as bottlenecks resulting in limiting throughput. A four-month research study by the authors together with hospital quality department and laboratory staff members led to reduction of the average TAT from 180 to 95minutes in the hematology lab and from 268 to 208 minutes in the biochemistry lab.

Very few improvement initiatives in Indian healthcare are based on industrial engineering tools and techniques, which might be due to a lack of interaction between healthcare and engineering. The study provides a positive outcome in terms of improving the efficiency of services in hospitals and identifies a scope for lean in the Indian healthcare sector.

Applying lean in the Indian healthcare sector gives its own potential solution to the problem caused, due to a wide gap between lean accessibility and lean implementation. Lean helped in changing the mindset of an organization toward providing the highest quality of services with faster delivery at an optimal cost.

This paper is an effort to reduce the gap between healthcare and industrial engineering and enhancing the use of lean practices in Indian healthcare. The study is motivated toward implementing lean methodology successfully in services.