The New York Times has a neat interactive graph based on data from the American Time Use Survey that lets you look at hour-by-hour time use broken down by sex, employment status, 3 racial/ethnic groups (White, Black, Hispanic), age, education, and number of children (though, unfortunately, you can’t search by more than one category at once). Here is the breakdown for the entire sample:
For people age 15-24:
Watching TV and movies takes up a lot of the time of those over age 65:
You can also click on a particular activity to get more information about it:
Those with advanced degrees spent the most time participating in sports or watching them in person; I suspect that the data might look a bit different if time spent watching sports on TV went in this category instead of the TV category:
Just a note, the averages for time spent at work seem pretty low, but that’s because they’re averaged over all days of the week, including any days off, rather than only days a person actually went to work.
Presumably the amount of time you’ll spend playing around with the site goes under computer use.
Comments 6
Umlud — July 21, 2010
There should be an area in the graph that is, "Spending time fiddling with the Time-Use graph." :D It's addictive!
anon mouse — July 23, 2010
so does having sex/making out fit under "socializing", "other leisure", or "couldn't remember / did not want to say"? Because it's gotta be in there somewhere...
linsey — July 25, 2010
I am baffled by the small percentage of computer time among all groups.
Katie — July 31, 2010
I have a very off topic question particularly for the Americans out there, brought on by the race categories above. I hope you'll forgive the tangent :) Firstly personal background: Im Irish and the vast majority of our non-whites have moved here in the past 20 years, mostly to earn money to send home. As such we lack the more complicated race dynamics present in countries like America, France and UK. Even bigots who are racist simply due to the other-ness of our new citizens are often aware that their dislike is nationality based rather than race based. ("Im not racist but I hate *insert nationality*")
Onwards to the question. The category of race seems very significant in most US social research presented in this blog. It seems to be more underlined than class and education differences. As I understand it, the reason race has such a significant influence in social difference is more due to class and education differences than race itself.
Why then is the focus on racial differences rather than class and education differences? Does the focus on race rather than the other two factors not mask the actual processes influencing the difference? Or is there an ideological motivation for highlighting racial differences in social research?