Americans' Time Use: A Focus on Women and Child Rearing—Structural Equations Modeling

This paper describes a model of Americans' time use in which time spent with children in home and out of home influences activity and travel time allocation. Although the activities and travel of children are studied more in depth now than in the past, to date few studies have examined the time spent with children as a dependent variable within a time use model. Most existing models of activity and travel participation allocate time-to-work activities, followed by obligatory maintenance activities and nonobligatory discretionary activities. The model described in this paper expands the data into eight activity categories to determine whether these activities are more or less necessary than past research assumed. The results suggest that the total amount of time spent inside the home with children has a statistically significant and negative impact on work, leisure, and personal activities inside the home, but work duration and work travel have no significant or practical impact on time spent with children, everything else being constant. There is also some indication that more time spent in in-home activities is associated with greater travel time expenditures. Overall, the 2007 American Time Use Survey contains a variety of details that help illuminate the answers to many such questions.