michelson

Journal of Social Issues, Vol. 59, No. 3, 2003, pp. 591--610

Focus on Home: What Time-Use Data CanTell About Caregiving to Adults

William Michelson∗University of Toronto

Lorne TeppermanUniversity of Toronto

Care by adults to other adults is being increasingly transferred from formal publicinstitutions to the private home. To learn more about the nature and situation ofCanadian adults providing care at home to other adults, we analyzed data fromStatistics Canada’s 1998 social survey of 10,749 persons. Data included time-useand respondents’ sociodemographic, cultural, work, and leisure characteristics, aswell as outcome factors. We found 212 respondents (about 2%) providing personal,medical, or other care to other household adults on the day studied. We comparedthem to those not found to provide these services. The article explores time-usetrade-offs, feelings of stress, and the ramifications of gender, age, and paid workin this newly reemerging use of household space.

Housing is an object. It has raw materials organized by design. It is a com-modity to be bought, sold, and rented. But housing is far more than that. Moreof the time than any other single place, housing is a setting for behavior (Szalai,Converse, Feldheim, Scheuch, & Stone, 1972)—by people of all ages, religions,social classes, and political persuasions, at any hour of the day, any day of theweek, and most, if not all, years of the life.

∗Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to William Michelson, Departmentof Sociology, University of Toronto, 725 Spadina Avenue, Toronto, Ontario M5S 2J4, Canada [e-mail:[email protected]].

A previous draft was written for the workshop on “The Residential Context of Health,” in theconference of the European Network for Housing Research, Gavle, Sweden, June 26–30, 2000. Weare grateful to Terry Hartig, Irene Frieze, Ingrid Olsson, David Crouse, and Glenn Stalker for helpfulsuggestions, as well as to five anonymous reviewers.

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C© 2003 The Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues

592 Michelson and Tepperman

Housing is certainly not a Procrustean bed. One size or shape does not fit all.Housing, like other built environments, offers opportunities and constraints for therealization of different patterns of behavior (Michelson, 1970) through differencesin size, shape, equipment, and technology. Over time, characteristic types of hous-ing come to be built in specific cultures and localities, to accommodate the habitualbehavior of modal segments of the population (Lawrence, 1987; Rapoport, 1969).That behavior reflects on the various functions that families and communities havelocated in the home. From a practical perspective, it follows that knowledge abouthow residents behave in their homes can inform housing provisions and policiesthat will ease the movement of functions into or out of them.

The objective of this article is to extend knowledge of what people experiencewhen their home becomes a place to provide care to another adult person. Thesource and type of the data that we examine are not conventional, but they offerthe opportunity to assess the substantive issue from a more representative andcontextually rich foundation. We therefore both examine the substance of care-giving to adults as an increasingly common modification to the use of homes andexplore the fruitfulness of the methodological approach. We shall look at each ofthese before turning to the analyses.

When Care to Adults Comes Home: Issues Across Cultures

The home has always been a place in which intimates take care of each other,as best they can. However, the waxing of the modern industrial city in the 20thcentury brought with it specialization—in health as in other matters. There was agrowing belief that large institutions employing professional specialists could domany jobs better. Suitably antiseptic hospitals contained staffs of highly trainednurses and physicians and maintained specialized equipment. It was a matter ofprogress that persons needing intensive or continuing medical care should get itin the protective hospital environment.

In recent years, though, the pendulum has begun to swing back. A trend to-wards deinstitutionalization reflects beliefs that, for many problems, removal fromthe local community or home takes a person away from close personal relation-ships and supports and into a dehumanized setting subject more to institutionalprerogatives. Regardless of the humane intentions underlying the deinstitutional-ization concept, deinstitutionalization has gone far because political leaders havefound that they can save money in the short term by downloading many functionsfrom large institutions to private persons without paying for equivalent supportsystems (Pescosolido, Wright, & Lutfey, 1999; Wright, Avirappattu, & Lafuze,1999). Care to adults has come back home—quickly after childbirth and surgeryand for indefinite periods for those with chronic problems. Although deinstitution-alization has brought with it demands for a greater supply of supportive housing

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options and services (e.g., Gallagher, Alcock, Diem, Angus, & Medves, 2002),those options and services may not be quickly available or affordable for manyhouseholds. What does this mean for adults who must use and maintain their homesonce again for the provision of necessary personal care to others?

When a caregiver is overburdened, the consequences can be devastating foran entire family. The caregiver’s mental and physical health suffers, the interac-tion between family members suffers, and the quality of care suffers. Caregiverburden then is the beginning of a vicious cycle for, as the quality of care decreases,care recipients experience a greater risk of incurring additional health problems(Gottlieb, Kelloway, & Fraboni, 1994; Gottlieb, Kelloway, & Martin-Matthews,1996; McDaniel, 1998; Tennstedt & Gonyea, 1994). This is a growing concern asthe number of people caring for ill family members in their own homes steadilyincreases.

The family home is also a workplace (however informal in most cases), andeach family has a characteristic and enduring division of labor. Families are con-sistent with society at large. Domestic labor, in short, is gendered labor (for agood Canadian overview of this, see Nakhaie, 1995). Adult women are expectedto carry out most of the work, and daughters are expected to do more of the workthan sons—a pattern that persists in caregiving; the primary caregiver is usually thewife, mother, or daughter. Women do more of this work even if they engage in paidemployment outside the home, they are parenting infants, or they are taking care ofsick or disabled family members. A study comparing detailed data from Canada,the United States, Sweden, Norway, and Australia (Baxter, 1997) finds that thefactors determining men’s and women’s participation in housework do not varymarkedly across countries, despite variations in ideology and gender-role attitudes.

The past two decades have seen more women holding jobs outside the home.Throughout the industrial world, women’s labor force participation and familylives have changed dramatically (Chafetz & Hagan, 1996). For women, workingoutside the home has many benefits. It contributes to their satisfaction, increasesthe likelihood of equal treatment within the home, and provides security in caseof marital dissolution. However, women continue to do most of the houseworkand child care. This results in overload, culturally induced stress, and spillover. Byoverload, we mean that women face an excessive amount of work; they are physi-cally and emotionally unable to keep up with the demands (Jacobson et al., 1996;Walters et al., 1996). By culturally induced stress, we mean that the workload—and the failure to complete it all—carries guilt-inducing meanings in our culture.By spillover, we mean that the demands and stresses from one domain spill overinto other domains of a woman’s life, affecting the functioning of the entire family(Gill & Hibbins, 1996; Moore, 1995).

What women face is a 21st-century work pattern and a 1950s division of laborat home. Sociologist Arlie Hochschild (1998) has suggested that domestic labor iseven less manageable and egalitarian than paid work, and this is why many womendo not take advantage of corporate arrangements like job-sharing. If they spend


less time at work, it simply means that they will be doing more at home. (See alsoSkrypnek & Fast, 1996; Wharton & Erickson, 1995).

Informal caregivers have a distinctive profile. Most are women, aged 30 to 59,and are married (Stommel, Given, Given, & Collins, 1995). Most are the children,parent, or partner of the care recipient. Nearly half of caregivers report they haveexperienced major health problems of their own in the past year (Gerin, 1995).Two thirds say they feel exhausted at the end of each day. Half feel they have moreto do than they can handle (Gottlieb et al., 1996; Schofield & Herman, 1993). Menmay provide occasional assistance, but are much less likely to assist with dailychores, for example (Stoller, 1990).

There has been much research on the stresses of the “double day,” or “dualburden,” phenomenon—the responsibility of particular family members to bothearn an income and maintain a household. When caregiving responsibilities areadded, the dangers of caregiver burnout and family breakdown increase dramat-ically. Although some research (for example, Loomis & Booth, 1995) finds noevidence that the additional burden of caregiving increases caregiver stress or re-duces the quality of family functioning, most other research draws an oppositeconclusion. It reports that the difficulty in balancing the demands of home andemployment produces considerable stress that, taken to extremes, contributes tolife-threatening health conditions (see, for example, Ginn & Sandell, 1997; Schar-lach & Fredriksen, 1994). Working women experience significant increases instress when they are forced to alter their work schedule to meet home care needsof an impaired, elderly family member (Orodenker, 1990). Women continue tobe far more likely than men to provide care, and to suffer consequent caregivingstrain, work interference, income loss, and role strain (Fredriksen, 1996).

Therefore, when turning our focus to the use of the home for adult caregiv-ing, the literature urges empirical attention to the family structure in which adultcaregiving occurs; the interrelation of caregiving with external, paid employment;the outcomes of caregiving for caregivers themselves; and the presence of genderas a factor in both the selection and subsequent experiences of caregivers.

Examining Home-Based Adult Care Through Time-Use

Time-use analysis is a specific methodological approach (e.g., Michelson,1990). As part of a time-use survey, people are asked to specify the activities theypursued during an actual period of time, usually one day or more. They can dothis in response to an interviewer’s questions or on a written questionnaire. If theanswers are oral, they typically refer to the previous day; if they take the form ofa written diary, the answers are recorded at intervals on a specified day to follow.In either case, the procedure involves starting either at an arbitrary time in theearly morning, such as 4 a.m., or else at such time as the respondent gets up. Amatrix of information is constructed, piece by piece, in chronological order of the

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activities pursued, when they start and when they finish, who else is present foreach activity, and where each activity takes place. In some studies, one or moresubjective dimensions are added to the matrix, such as the respondent’s assessmentof the degree of stress or of pleasure experienced during the episodes of activityreported (Michelson, 1999).

This approach provides researchers with data about the detailed behavioralcontent and context of people’s everyday lives, the social contacts they have inthe process, and the locational attributes of both of these previous considerations,as well as respondents’ subjective appreciation of their situation (when included).These are drawn from people’s concrete experiences in real time, not from hy-pothetical responses to more generalized questions. The accuracy of this data-gathering approach concerning immediately tangible time periods has been vali-dated (e.g., Ziegler & Michelson, 1981), though it cannot be expected to providevalid information on socially unacceptable or illegal forms of behavior (Michelson,1990).

Typical time-use studies involve complementary questioning through moreconventional approaches, to enable the analysis of the time-related data with otherinformation on people’s characteristics and on special topics of interest. Early stud-ies in this genre varied between very applied social policy analyses and descriptivestudies of how people in different milieus lead their daily lives. Over the years,time-use studies have addressed such questions as work, leisure, domestic divisionof labor, commuting and other aspects of everyday travel, aging, and much more(e.g., Szalai et al., 1972; Michelson, 1978; Staikov, 1982; Harvey, Szalai, Elliott,Stone, & Clark, 1984; Pentland, Harvey, Lawton, & McColl, 1999). Researchershave been enabled by the time-use method to examine a range of everyday behav-iors and how they vary among population subgroups. Also, they can understandmore fully the social and environmental contexts of activity, such as the home.

As the value of documenting time-use became more widely recognized, manynational census bureaus began to hold representative national studies of this phe-nomenon, as part of their gathering of important national information (e.g., Harvey,Marshall, & Frederick, 1991). The most recent Canadian time-use study has over10,000 respondents, representing well the national population from the age of15. The repeated application of time-use surveys of the population has enabledanalyses of behavioral change over time (e.g., Robinson & Godbey, 1997).

Such large national time-use studies now make possible an additional con-tribution. On some topics, it is difficult to find a representative sample for studybecause there is no obvious way of identifying a large number of people with partic-ular characteristics objectively. In some cases, appropriate subgroups for furtheranalysis can be determined by looking at certain aspects of people’s everydaybehavior.

This kind of contribution can be made to the greater understanding of whathappens when care to adults occurs more frequently at home. We took Statistics


Canada’s General Social Survey 12, gathered in 1998, as the basis for a searchfor adults providing care at home to other adults. We searched the 10,749 casesto identify people found to spend time providing “personal,” “medical,” or “othercare” to another adult who lives in the same household. A subsample of 212 caseswas identified. The total duration of time given across the selected adult careactivities in the day had a mean of 70 minutes and a median of 30 minutes. Thehighest quartile devoted more than 79 minutes to caregiving.

Consistent with the literature noted in the preceding section, our analysesfocus on the characteristics of the caregiver, the extent that caregiving is associ-ated with other differences in daily life compared to the rest of the population,and the degree of differential personal outcomes such as stress that accompanycaregiving. Findings on these phenomena help us to understand what accompaniescontemporary trends toward more use of the home for caregiving.

Results

Who Cares?

What are the characteristics of those found to care for other household adultson the day covered by their time-use report? Do they differ significantly fromthose not giving such care that day?

As expected, the proportion of women to men among the caregivers is muchgreater than among the noncaregivers. Almost two thirds of the caregivers arewomen, compared to only 54.6% in the rest of the sample. This is a highly signif-icant difference (χ2 = 9.21, df = 1, p = .002).

Caregivers are less likely to have worked at a job or business in the previousweek. Only 45.1% did so, compared to 61.4% of noncaregivers. This differenceis also statistically significant (χ2 = 22.31, df = 1, p = .000).

The caregivers are somewhat older. Though just over 50% lie between the agesof 35 and 54, another 37% are divided evenly in the 10-year age brackets of 55–64,65–74, and 75 and above. Given that the time-use data sample only the caregivingshown on a single day, this is consistent with recent American studies suggestingthat 35% of all caregivers are over 65 years of age (“Helping the Patient,” 2000).The noncaregivers are skewed towards younger ages. The mean age of caregiversis 51, compared to 45 for the noncaregivers, while the median ages for the twocategories are 49 and 42. The difference between means is statistically significant,F(1, 10747) = 24.83, p = .000.

Viewed from the perspective of age cohorts, the oldest category, of persons 75and older, contains the highest percentage of caregivers, as might be expected; butthis percentage is still only 3.3% of all respondents in that age bracket. The nexthighest age group for caregiving is within 45–54 years. So although the caregivers

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are clearly older, they are not overwhelmingly restricted to senior citizens or evenprevalent among senior citizens.

There are many other ways to describe the family situation of caregivers.They are much more likely to be married (72.6% to 47.3%; χ2 = 60.64, df = 5,p = .000). Most don’t have children living at home, but if they do, the children areat least in their teens; children in noncaregiver families are typically younger (χ2 =72.83, df = 5, p = .000). Caregivers do not live alone, but 72.7% of them live eitherwith their spouse alone or with a child under 25. Only 8% of caretaker familieslive in three-generation households, but this is still greater than 1.9% among thenoncaregivers (χ2 = 38.77, df = 1, p = .000).

We searched within the days of individuals to select periods of time whenthey performed one or another caregiving activity involving a household adult andthen sought out the information on which person or persons were present with therespondent. Typically, no more than one person was named. Excepting the fewnonhousehold members named, it is most likely that this person was the recipientof the care. Spouses are more than half of the recipients (51.9%), and almostall the rest are members of the household. The next older generation is a smallminority, at 13.2%. Only 8.6% of caregiving episodes at home are to nonhouseholdmembers.

There are no noticeable differences between caregivers and noncaregivers intheir occupational rankings, according to the Pineo Socio-Economic Classification(e.g., Pineo & Porter, 1967). Both categories include a wide range of occupationallevels in almost the exact same percentages (χ2 = 5.73, df = 5, p = .334).

To this point, our conclusions from time-use analyses are largely consistentwith the literature discussed earlier in the article. In the next section, we shall turn tobehavioral and subjective outcomes of caregiving, keeping in mind for the sectionthereafter the extent that explanation reflects caregiving at home or, instead, oneor another of the significant characteristics of the caregivers themselves.

Behavioral and Subjective Aspects of Adult Caregiving

On caregiving. While the selection of persons categorized as caregivers wasbased on putting in some time during the day reflected by the time-use protocol,this is certainly only a platform from which to proceed. For example, these personsdiffer from each other and from noncaregivers in the sheer amount of time theydevote to caregiving on the day in question. As noted earlier, there is a considerablerange in the duration of caregiving activities in the day; this extends among thecaregivers from 1 to 885 minutes. It is therefore no wonder that the mean total timedevoted to caregiving exceeds the median by about 230%. The standard deviationamong caregivers is 107 minutes; standard deviations for time devoted to specificactivities are commonly high, as they reflect persons with zero participation incertain activities as well as persons with extensive participation.


In addition to the total time devoted, caregiving differs in terms of how it isdistributed throughout the day. One measure of this is the number of episodes ofcaregiving activities. The mean number of occurrences of caregiving per caretakeris 1.55, with a standard deviation of 1.25; this indicates that there is considerablevariation in occurrences of caregiving during the day. The literature on educationsuggests that the intertwining of many activities during the day, with constant startsand stops, induces stress among teachers (Hargreaves, 1990, 1992); this is calledintensification.

With the data on total duration of caregiving activities and the number ofoccurrences of caregiving per person, we computed a measure of the mean durationof individual caregiving activities. The subsample mean of durations of caregivingactivities is 44.13 minutes, with a standard deviation of 60.63 minutes. Again, thisreflects great variability in the measure.

The value of a measure lies in its fruitfulness in explanation. To what extentdo these different measures relate to variation in aspects potentially reflecting theexistence, duration, and distribution of caregiving activities?

Behavioral aspects . There are many ways to categorize aspects of everydaybehavior. The time-use tradition gives three general directions at the start: activities,persons present during activities, and the locations of these activities. Differentresearch teams have come up with different categorical schemes. The pioneeringwork by Szalai et al. (1972) in a 12-nation multinational study came up with 99categories of activity alone. The Statistics Canada data set used in this study usesthree-digit codes for specific activities which amount to at least several hundredactivity codes; at the same time, they code a much smaller number of clustersof activity such as household work at the level of the total duration for the day.Location and persons present have also been coded in many ways. In the presentcase, our focus is on those aspects of behavior for which logic and the literaturehypothesize a relationship with caregiving at home.

The data in Table 1 show that those categorized as caregivers spend signifi-cantly more time in the day, besides that given to the care of other adults withintheir household, on domestic work, care to children under 15 years of age, shop-ping and the procurement of services, and civic and/or volunteer work outside thehome. The caregivers spend significantly less time in paid employment. There isno significant difference between caregivers and noncaregivers in the time theydevote to personal care (i.e., for themselves, which includes sleep), attention tothe media and other forms of communication, eating meals, and socializing in aresidential setting.

It is probably not surprising that those with caregiving responsibilities areless likely to spend time in paid employment but end up with greater amounts ofdomestic work and care to younger children. This is a familiar trade-off. But itis not necessarily intuitive that those giving care at home are also found to spend

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Table 1. Differences Between Caregivers and Noncaregivers in Mean Minutes in a Day in SelectedActivities, in Certain Locations, and With Particular Persons (Standard Deviations in Parentheses)

Caregivers Noncaregivers F

Activities:Paid employment 138 (243.88) 221 (289.52) 17.24∗∗∗Domestic work 172 (141.74) 127 (137.92) 22.51∗∗∗Care to under 15’s 109 (128.68) 28 (74.13) 237.59∗∗∗Shopping/services 60 (77.65) 47 (80.78) 5.81∗Personal care (sleep) 623 (140.78) 626 (146.71) 0.09Media/communication 180 (147.95) 182 (158.58) 0.04Civic/volunteer 109 (138.00) 21 (70.03) 308.72∗∗∗Meals 66 (43.11) 64 (45.13) 0.40Socializing in houses 72 (100.42) 82 (127.31) 1.14

Locations:At home 1083 (290.76) 984 (321.55) 19.61∗∗∗At work 100 (201.11) 176 (255.99) 18.30∗∗∗Someone else’s home 31 (93.96) 60 (162.54) 6.69∗∗Another place 141 (163.29) 142 (191.05) 0.02

Persons present:None (alone) 332 (213.29) 376 (269.82) 5.59∗Spouse/partner 285 (262.03) 168 (241.22) 48.74∗∗∗Child under 15 78 (174.61) 91 (193.33) 0.89Parents/in-laws 32 (115.42) 11 (62.83) 21.37∗∗∗Others living at home 87 (178.20) 27 (100.28) 71.93∗∗∗Friends 58 (136.22) 105 (188.31) 12.71∗∗∗Others 128 (197.30) 183 (242.20) 10.78∗∗∗

n = 212 (persons) 10,537

Note. The F tests had 1 df in the numerator and 10747 df in the denominator.∗ p < .05. ∗∗ p < .01. ∗∗∗ p < .001.

considerable time in external civic and volunteer work. The lack of differencein personal care and sleep is surprising, given that caregivers are said to takethe caregiving time away from the attention to their own personal needs time; inaggregate, at least, this trade-off is not evident.

It follows from the activity data that caregivers spend more time at home andless at an external workplace than the noncaregivers do. Perhaps more significantis that caregivers spend only half as much time in other people’s homes. Giventhe responsibility of caregiving, people spend more of their socializing time (andother activities) at home and not out in somebody else’s home.

Several of these results—greater time spent by caregivers at home, less timein both workplace locations and other people’s homes, and greater time devotedto domestic work—suggest a growing salience of the nature and efficiency of thehome for this situation.

There are a number of logical differences in time spent with particular personsand types of persons. Caregivers spend much more time than do noncaregivers with


their own spouse, not least because this person is most likely to be the one for whomcare is given. By the same logic, more time is spent with parents or in-laws wholive in the same household and with other people who live there as well. The trade-off in this case is far less time spent with friends and others (who would includework colleagues). Caregivers do not suffer from a lack of contact. They are alonesignificantly less in the day than noncaregivers. The difference may lie in the kindand variety of daily contacts people have (not to speak of the locus for contact).

Caregivers have a greater number of episodes of activity during the day, sug-gesting the possibility of a more intensified existence, as noted earlier. The dif-ference between 26 and 21 episodes is, at the least, statistically significant, F(1,10747) = 149.07, p < .001.

The above-cited findings reflect the nominal distinction between whether ornot respondents evidence any sign of caregiving in their day. This distinction issignificant because, for those categorized as caregivers, it suggests the presenceof a certain amount of responsibility to one or more adults. Furthermore, thereis a solid argument that the expenditure of greater or lesser amounts of time tocaregiving is dynamically related to how much time is available for allocation toother kinds of activity. Therefore, we computed binary correlations of the totaltime devoted to household adult care with the same behavioral variables selectedfor Table 1. These are reported in Table 2. This latter table involves only the 212caregivers, insofar as only this subsample, by definition, has positive values forcaregiving, and it eliminates the large number of zeros from the noncaregivers,which would reduce the correlational analysis to meaninglessness.

A comparison of Tables 1 and 2 shows that measuring caregiving in dailyduration accounts for some limited increase in time-use variation compared to thenominal caregiver/noncaregiver distinction. Regarding activities, the two measuresof caregiving are equally indicative of daily activity, with one exception. Whilecaregivers in aggregate do more domestic work than noncaregivers, the amountthey do declines with the duration of time devoted to caregiving.

There is a change in the direction of the relationship when the duration ofcaregiving time is correlated to time spent in someone else’s home. While care-givers in aggregate spend less time in other people’s homes, there is a positiverelationship between the amount of time they spend in other people’s homes andthe amount of time they devote to caregiving to household members. In addition,the significant relationships between caregiving and time spent at home and (in-versely) at work lose their statistical significance when duration of caregiving isintroduced. The correlation is nearly zero for the relationship between durationof caregiving and time at home, which suggests that the responsibility for care-giving is more highly related to time spent at home than is the actual duration ofcaregiving.

Finally, the relationships of caregiving to persons present lose their signif-icance in the correlations between duration of caregiving and time spent alone

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Table 2. Binary Correlations (Pearson) Between Duration of Caregiving and Total Minutes in a Dayin Selected Activities, in Certain Locations, and With Particular Persons, for Caregivers (N = 212)

r

Activities:Paid employment −.165∗Domestic work −.176∗∗Care to under 15’s .806∗∗∗Shopping/services −.130Personal care (sleep) .032Media/communication −.071Civic/volunteer .771∗∗∗Meals .051Socializing in houses −.083

Locations:At home .001At work −.118Someone else’s home .148∗Another place .124

Persons present:None (alone) −.079Spouse/partner .145∗Child under 15 −.132Parents/in-laws .152∗Others living at home −.050Friends .027Others −.186∗∗

Mean # of episodes −.333∗∗∗∗ p < .05. ∗∗ p < .01. ∗∗∗ p < .001.

(i.e., no other people present), with other household members, and with friends.Although the relationships are not strong, the direction also shifts with respect tothe latter two variables.

Thus, measuring caregiving in terms of the total amount of time devoted toit during the day does extend the analysis of caregiving in certain cases. But thestrength of the nominal caregiving/noncaregiving distinction, as a likely reflectionof responsibilities that accompany caregiving, remains. The home becomes moresignificant in daily life, in terms of the time caregivers spend there and the activitiesthey do there. This finding supports the assertions of Kane, Reinardy, Penrod, andHuck (1999) on this matter. In the next section, we will examine whether thisdomestic situation is related to subjective outcomes.

Subjective aspects. Subjective outcomes were assessed via a number of ques-tions, some self-standing and others forming scales. We focus in this analysis onquestions assessing self-stated happiness, life satisfaction, stress, time pressure,and the day’s most enjoyable activity.


The nominal distinction between caregivers and noncaregivers is not relatedin any way to respondents’ self-stated feelings of happiness and life satisfaction.

In contrast, 35% of the caregivers said they felt “a lot” of stress in the previous2 weeks, compared to only 20% of the noncaregivers. Caregivers differ signifi-cantly in this direction from noncaregivers on the 5-point stress scale (χ2 = 29.04,df = 4, N = 10,162, p = .000). When asked their main source of stress, 46% ofthe caregivers cited family, compared to only 19% of the noncaregivers. The latterwere more likely to cite work.

The relationship of caregiving status to feelings of time pressure is also sig-nificant. We measured time pressure using Robinson’s Time Crunch Index (seeRobinson & Godbey, 1997). The index is the number of positive answers to 10questions, of which the following 3 are illustrative and highly pertinent:

• Do you feel that you just don’t have time for fun anymore?

• Do you often feel under stress when you don’t have enough time?

• Would you like to spend more time alone?

A larger number of positive responses designates a greater feeling of timepressure.

Caregivers show a mean Time Crunch Index value of 4.18, compared to 3.74for the noncaregivers, a statistically significant difference, F(1, 10162) = 5.76,p = .016. However, time pressure is not related to the amount of time put into careto household adults (r = .029, p = .679, n = 207)—only to the nominal care-taker/noncaretaker dichotomy. In this regard, feelings of time crunch are inverse tothe amount of time shared with the spouse/partner (r = −.227, p = .001, n = 207).But these feelings are positively related to the duration of contact with householdchildren under 15 (r = .234, p = .001, n = 207)! Although there is no difference bycaregiver status in time devoted to the media and other forms of communication,feelings of time crunch are significantly less among those spending more timeon such specific activities as watching TV or reading the newspaper (r = −.284,p = .000, n = 207).

On the positive side, the most enjoyable activity of those done on the dayreported is typically found in the respondents’ homes, whether a caregiver or not.Caregivers are more likely to feel this way, 60.5% to 52.1%, though this relation-ship is not statistically significant (χ2 = 12.51, df = 9, p = .186). Nonetheless,caregivers are significantly more likely to choose their spouse/partner as the personpresent during the most enjoyable activity (35.2% to 23.8%; χ2 = 12.61, df = 1,p = .000); children under age 15 are seldom part of the most enjoyable activity inboth caregiver and noncaregiver households (11.7% vs. 16.1%; χ2 = 2.50, df =1, p = .114). Thus, data on the most enjoyable activity complement and confirmstress and sources of stress data regarding the positive and negative implicationsof caregiving.

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In short, although feelings of stress and time pressure are greater among thesecaregivers, they are not unhappy or unsatisfied with their lives. While they wishto be alone somewhat more, the crunch appears to come more from their preadultchildren than from being with and taking care of other adults, particularly theirspouses.

Competing Explanations: Caregiving, Gender, Age, and Work

Behavioral aspects. In the previous section, we documented a number of sig-nificant relationships between the dichotomous nominal conception of caregivingand the amount of time respondents are seen to spend during the day on specificactivities, in particular locations, and in the company of specific kinds of persons.Caregivers were also shown to have significantly more discrete episodes of behav-ior than noncaregivers. Nevertheless, both the previously cited literature and ourfindings indicate that caregivers are disproportionately likely to be women, older,and less likely to have been in the paid labor force in the previous 2 weeks, factorsthat typically explain many differences in everyday behavior. Are the behavioralaspects of moving caregiving back into homes actually functions of these other,typically potent explanatory variables?

To address this question, we ran an analysis of variance (ANOVA) for each ofthe time-use variables that we had found to vary significantly with caregiving, asdescribed previously and indicated in Table 1. As fixed factors in these ANOVA,we used caregiving (caregiver, noncaregiver), work status (paid work in the pastweek, no paid work in the past week), gender (male, female), and age (15–24, 25–34, 35–44, 45–54, 55–64, 65–74, 75 and over). In each of the analyses, we wantedto determine whether the association between the time-use variable and caregivingwould be in the same direction and statistically significant even after includingwork status, gender, and age as explanatory factors. To indicate the impacts ofthese controls on the previously described associations between caregiving anduses of time, we report the F values for the main effects of caregiving and theother explanatory factors in Table 3.

We noted earlier that Table 1 showed a number of significant differences be-tween caregivers and noncaregivers in the time they spend on selected activities, incertain locations, and with particular persons—sometimes more time and some-times less. We see in Table 3 that the caregiving variable retains its significantlevels of relationship with many of these time-use measures, despite the explana-tory values of gender, age, and work. Caregiving to adults remains significantlypositively associated with time devoted to children under 15 and to civic and vol-unteer work. It remains significantly positively related to time spent at home andnegatively related to time spent in the homes of others. Significantly more timeis still found among caregivers with the spouse or partner, parents or in-laws, andothers living at home; significantly less time remains with friends and being alone.


Table 3. Independent Associations of Caregiving, Work Status Last Week, Gender, and Age WithMean Minutes in a Day in Selected Activities, in Certain Locations, and With Particular Persons

(N = 10,069)

Caregiving Work Gender Age

ActivitiesPaid employment 0.26 84.59∗∗∗ 0.15 2.12∗Domestic work 1.62 0.90 49.62∗∗∗ 6.93∗∗∗Care to under 15’s 110.26∗∗∗ 9.46∗∗ 3.20 6.87∗∗∗Shopping/services 0.43 0.02 0.61 1.11Civic/volunteer 105.19∗∗∗ 2.80 1.87 2.76∗LocationsAt home 5.93∗ 32.14∗∗∗ 3.51 2.84∗∗At work 1.43 53.05∗∗∗ 0.11 2.02Someone else’s home 5.52∗ 0.05 0.04 0.44

Persons presentNone (alone) 8.01∗∗ 0.00 0.23 4.47∗∗∗Spouse/partner 14.67∗∗∗ 0.68 3.77 6.84∗∗∗Parents/in-laws 25.94∗∗∗ 35.31∗∗∗ 3.33 24.77∗∗∗Others living at home 26.50∗∗∗ 2.40 1.67 4.98∗∗∗Friends 4.34∗ 0.48 3.25 3.85∗∗∗Others 0.40 26.17∗∗∗ 0.56 2.00

Mean # episodes 47.43∗∗∗ 0.92 27.89∗∗∗ 4.43∗∗∗

Note. Values are for the F tests of main effects from a multifactorial analysis of variance that used thegiven time-use variable as the dependent variable. The main effects of caregiving, work, and genderhave 1 df in the numerator, whereas that for age has 6; all of the effects have 10018 df in the denominator.∗ p < .05. ∗∗ p < .01. ∗∗∗ p < .001.

Exceptions are highly logical. For example, time spent in paid employmentvaries primarily with work status and, to a lesser extent, with age. Domestic workis much more a function of gender and age. But when it comes to locations andpersons present, the caregiving variable keeps its significance regardless of thethree controls in all cases except time spent at work and with (usually work-related)others, for which it is no surprise that the work variable is highly significant. Thisadds salience to our concern for the characteristics of housing in which caregiversspend so much time and center their social contacts.

Whether a respondent had paid work in the previous week remains a potentexplanation of some aspects of behavior independent of caregiving. Gender, onthe other hand, remains significantly associated with domestic work and a highermean number of episodes of behavior. However, it has an independent relation-ship with fewer of the selected behavioral variables than caregiving, age, or workstatus.

Even with the controls, age shows significant independent relationships withmost of these behavioral variables. While such retained strength of an importantexplanatory variable is not surprising, it does not vitiate the strength of the caregivervariable.

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Fig. 1. Mean scores on Robinson’s Time Crunch Index by caregiving and age.

Note. Time crunch scores can range from zero (low time crunch) to 10 (high time crunch). Of thetotal sample, 585 respondents lacked data on one of the variables, leaving 207 caregivers and 9,957noncaregivers.

Subjective aspects. The same form of multifactorial analysis of variance wasapplied to scores on the Robinson Time Crunch Index. Before such multivariatecontrols, caregiving, work status, gender, and age each explained a significantamount of variation in perceptions of time pressure. We mentioned earlier thatcaregiving is associated with greater time pressure. Greater time pressure is alsoassociated with having a job [F(1, 10162) = 819.07, p = .000], being a woman[F(1, 10162) = 29.77, p = .000], and younger ages [F(1, 10162) = 306.77,p = .000]. However, in the multifactorial ANOVA only caregiving and age retainstatistically significant main effects; F(1, 10015) = 7.71 and F(6, 10015) = 12.40,respectively, ps < .005. This raises a logical question in principle. If caregivers areolder, and older people report less time pressure, how is it that caregivers showhigher levels of time pressure? Figure 1 illustrates this matter. The caregivers reporthigher pressure than the noncaregivers within all age groups but the youngest.Although time pressure declines with later age cohorts, the decline appears morepronounced among the noncaregivers after age 55.

The behavioral and subjective aspects of caregiving follow a similar pat-tern. The analyses show that the major relationships of the nominal dichotomouscaregiving variable with dependent variables largely maintain their significance


independent of three of the most powerful variables that pertain to everyday life—work, age, and gender. These latter variables are not diminished very much in theirexplanatory value, given the number of relationships in which they maintain in-dependent significance. But just because a variable is helpful in explaining someoutcomes does not mean it is omnipotent. There are many situations in whichcaregiving status may be irrelevant. But the power of caregiving status on aspectsof everyday life and feelings of time pressure/stress need be paid close attentionwhen coming to grips with the increasing degree to which caregiving is delegatedto members of the family (especially spouses) in their own homes.

Concluding Remarks on Impacts and Policy

All of this suggests that the home becomes more and more the center of theuniverse on an everyday basis when adults care for others in the home. Being acaregiver focuses more of the day and its activities on the home, to accommodatethe needs of a loved one. Adaptation to the concerted focus on this one part of theuniverse is a challenge to an increasingly highly educated population, accustomedto a larger stage of daily activity, performance in both public and private places, anda sharp differentiation of work time and nonwork time, instrumental and expressiveactivities. This puts greater demands on the spatial and infrastructural adequacyof the dwelling unit, including its size and efficiency both for caregiving and forrelating to others more and more from one’s own home base. Families made lessable to undertake caregiving activities from a suitable environment by emerginggovernmental policies and market forces will be doubly challenged and potentiallyat greater risk for negative consequences of stress.

The patterns of findings, as well as the specific points involved, indicate thattime-use data provide some unique and useful insights into particular kinds oflives, such as lives that include regularized caregiving.

What can time-use data tell about caregiving to adults? In the most elementarysense, time-use data tell us which people are using their homes for care to others,consistent with deinstitutionalization trends. These data make it possible to embedcaregiving in the wider range of activities people pursue during a day, in and awayfrom home, including considerations of location and social contact. Insofar assurvey content includes subjective outcomes, this enables another dimension withwhich to understand what actually happens in a particular combination of time andplace.

Our analysis focused on a number of details that contribute to a larger picture.They show that when adults take care of other adults at home, this has a varietyof potential implications—through feelings of responsibility rooted in the home,through trade-offs of time within the daily ration of 24 hours, and through con-sequent feelings of time pressure and stress. Although caregivers differ in theircharacteristics from noncaregivers, with some of the clear differences coming from

Focus on Home 607

variables with a long history of strong and helpful explanation (gender and workstatus), the role of caregiving is significant and independent. This has an importantmessage attached to it. Were the caregiving implications to have been explainedaway by these competing variables, the implications of moving adult care backinto household space would be far less.

But while our analyses show that caregiving entails differing behavioral de-mands and accompanying feelings of time crunch, there is no evidence that peo-ple’s feelings of general happiness and life satisfaction are thereby altered. Mostcaregiving in this sample of people and time is given to a spouse. Indeed, mosthouseholds in which caregiving takes place are small, and other people are usu-ally not present during explicit caregiving activities. While the family is a majorsource of stress in the lives of the caregivers, it is also a source of the most en-joyed activities, particularly time spent, often in passive ways, with the spouse.If these data indicate a potential source of friction, it involves contact with chil-dren under 15 when the caretaker also has to provide care to another adult. Thesedata also show that it is more the responsibility for having to take care of an-other adult person that is central to the issue, not the absolute amount of timegiven.

There are also some clear shortcomings, however, with the data we analyzed.Such a survey is only as good as the relevance of the data gathered. The JohnsHopkins group (“Helping the Patient,” 2000) also notes that depression is a com-mon occurrence among caregivers. Time-use surveys are more likely than ever toinclude questions about stress from the perspective of time pressure, given the in-tellectual proximity of time use and time pressure. The Statistics Canada’s GeneralSocial Survey 12 (GSS12) also had questions that could enable a calculation oflife stressors, should that be pertinent; but there are no questions eliciting signs ofdepression.

While there is a rich variety of subjective material on the GSS12, the subjectivevalence of particular activities—and combinations at the episode level of activity,location, and persons present—is better served by a dedicated subjective dimensionin the time-use matrix for each episode. This enables a grounding of both objectiveand subjective phenomena in the same, actual activity. It enables a finer tuning ofsatisfaction and/or stress than was possible here.

In a survey of this size and complexity, some important facts are just notelicited. Therefore, we do not know to what kind of problems the caregivers areresponding. And the coding of persons present does not give total confidence thatan accurate interpretation has been made as to the characteristics of who is beingcared for, compared to who happens to be there at the same time. Inferences onthis can be made that reflect the numbers of people involved and who they are, butthese inferences are not foolproof.

In addition, we are sure that the several categories of care to other residentadults greatly underestimate the amount of caregiving occurring, because many


acts of caregiving can be categorized as typical daily activities, such as cookingand shopping.

The difficulties we describe are not inevitable. The advantages of time-useinquiry can be gained with improvements in survey design, content, and coding.But accomplishing this in a survey that serves many masters is a challenge.

Nonetheless, our findings suggest that the challenge may be worth taking. Thegrowth of caregiving at home at the same time that the proportion of the elderlyis growing raises, once again (e.g., Nystrom, 1991), serious questions about theadequacy of the housing market—regarding both quantity and quality. Should itbe surprising that changes in health policy contain major housing implications?We think not.

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WILLIAM MICHELSON is S.D. Clark Professor of Sociology, University ofToronto. His research interests center on the many contexts of everyday life andtheir impacts on behavior. Previous publications have dealt with housing, urbaninfrastructure including transportation, and home-based work.

LORNE TEPPERMAN is Professor and Chair, Department of Sociology, Uni-versity of Toronto. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University. His researchinterests have focused on the family, health, and Canadian society. His many pub-lications include texts on the field of sociology and on writing research papers,not to speak of his special research interests.

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