statistics

…The more they stay the same. That is one conclusion University of Maryland sociologist John Robinson draws from the results of the 2012 American Time Use Survey. Despite the global economic downturn in 2008 and subsequent elevated levels of unemployment in the U.S., the breakdown of how Americans spend their time has changed little over the past five years.

In 2007, Americans reported working an average of 7.6 hours per day. Five years later, in 2012, employed people worked for 7.7 hours each day, while dedicating two hours to chores and five to six hours to leisure (approximately half of that leisure time is spent watching television).

Robinson explained the similar time use as social inertia:

We went through the biggest recession in history, we went through the most economic turmoil. And yet we see very little decline in the time that people spend working.

Other notable statistics include the growing parity in how much time men and women spend more equal amounts of time working, doing housework, and taking part in the leisure activities than they did 50 years ago. Additionally, U.S. citizens are found to be increasingly sedentary. Between leisure time spent in front of the television and sedentary work environments, Americans use little of their time in physical activity.

Media attention around the Republican crop of presidential candidates, as well as a new ad campaign with the tagline “I am a Mormon,” have popularized discussion about the Church of Latter-day Saints. In Utah, however, new data shows Mormonism isn’t as prominent as it once was, especially among men. A report written by sociologists Rick Phillips (University of North Florida) and Ryan Cragun (University of Tampa) and released by Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut found that Utah’s Mormon majority is shrinking. It’s now down to 57 percent, and men account for only 40 percent of those Utah Mormons (down from 47.5 percent two decades ago).

In their paper, the Salt Lake Tribune reports, Phillips and Cragun suggest the reason for this widening gender gap might be that Utah’s men are abandoning their faith at higher rates than women. In the past, Mormon men remained tied to the church rather than lose their social standing in the community, argue Phillips and Cragun, both on the board of the Mormon Social Science Association. “However, declining Mormon majorities [in Utah] may have weakened that link, and Mormon men who lack a strong subjective religious commitment to the church are now free to apostatize without incurring sanctions in other social settings.”

Other scholars in the field, disagree with Phillips and Cragun’s interpretation of the data. David Campbell, a political scientist at the University of Notre Dame, points out to the Salt Lake Tribune this shift isn’t necessarily due to men leaving the church, but could also be a result of more women joining. And Marie Cornwall, sociologist at Brigham Young University and editor of the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, has her own criticism of Phillips and Cragun’s conclusions:

They have no way of knowing whether the growing gap reflects migration patterns—professional men and women leave the state to look for jobs and, given the lower rates of professional women, that may mean that men are leaving the state as much as it means that they are leaving the [LDS] Church.

As in so many other cases, the numbers can’t tell the whole story of why the population of Utah’s male Mormons seems to be shrinking.