Time use

The paper focuses on temporal aspects of informal caring for older people. Limitations of large-scale surveys in capturing such data are noted and time-use methodology, despite its own limitations, is proposed as a promising alternative. Adopting a critical perspective on time that includes carers' own conceptualisations, we report the findings of a qualitative study of carers' time use. Sixty-two interviews with carers, male/female, co-resident/not co-resident, employed/not employed, and located across Great Britain were conducted.

This paper examines the risk of time poverty defined as leisure participation among informal caregivers of adults and older people. We draw on the most recent time use survey conducted in Poland, which incorporated more than 28,000 households in 2013. We assess the extent to which caregivers are more likely to experience shortages of time spent on physical activity, hobbies, and social life. Additional information about respondents' time preferences allows us to examine not only the objective and relative time deficits of caregivers, but also the subjective and expressed ones.

The diminished wellbeing of caregivers is well documented, but studies typically draw upon coarse measures of time use and thus provide limited understanding of the role of specific care activities in the daily lives of care providers.

Population ageing requires understanding the implications of eldercare. Using American Time Use Surveys, the authors find that caregivers spend less time on personal care and social activities/sports, and more time on housework, than individuals who do not provide any eldercare. They also report higher stress and lower happiness. In addition, caregivers may not provide care every day, but on days when they do, they also spend more time on housework and less on paid work, and report higher levels of sadness than on days when they do not provide care.

Caregiving for family members is often described as a 36-hour day. Previous literature has suggested that family caregivers have little time to attend to their own health needs, such as participating in leisure-time physical activity. Using data from the Health and Retirement Study, we analyze whether time-allocation decisions reflect a conflict between time devoted to informal care and time devoted to self-health promotion through physical activity.