Ignace Glorieux

More than preparing a meal? Concerning the meanings of home cooking.

Cooking is one of the basic activities in our lives. However, people frequently feel they fall short of time to cook when facing problems with the temporal organization of daily life. How people think about home cooking is considered to be important for the time they spend on preparing meals. It is assumed that the meaning of cooking differs for different people, depending on the temporal and social context. This contribution allows us to clarify how the meaning of cooking varies according to individual and household characteristics and the cooking occasion. By using the pooled time-diary data from the Flemish time-use surveys from 1999 and 2004 we can examine peoples views on cooking in order to understand how people use time for food preparation. Although the results suggest that people consider cooking primarily as a household chore, preparing food can also be a way to please others, as well as themselves. It seems that feelings of time pressure and the family situation are clearly related to mens and womens cooking experiences. Furthermore, the meaning of cooking also tends to be clearly influenced by the meal situation and (the moment of) the day.

Change and stability in commensality patterns: a comparative analysis of Belgian time-use data from 1966, 1999 and 2004

The decline of the family meal is a popular concern in contemporary Western society. This article assesses how commensality patterns have evolved in Belgium over the last four decades and which factors have an impact on commensality. The study uses Belgian time-budget data from 1966 and 1999 to obtain an insight into the evolution of commensality patterns. Flemish time-use data from 2004 are used to determine the factors that affect commensality patterns. It is concluded that there has been a significant decrease in family commensality between 1966 and 1999, while eating has become more individualized during the same period. This holds for all days of the week and for breakfast, lunch and dinner. The data also revealed that a number of factors that are often assumed to entail the individualization of eating practices, such as the increased availability of products for self-catering, have little impact on commensality patterns in practice. The factor with the strongest impact on commensality patterns is living arrangements. People who live alone generally do not have anyone with whom to share their meals. Married and cohabiting couples, on the other hand, tend to eat together on a regular basis, while parents still share the majority of meal-times with their co-resident children.

Men Taking Up Career Leave: An Opportunity for a Better Work and Family Life Balance?

In 2004, 9 per cent of female employees took advantage of the system of ‘career break’ or ‘time credit’ in Flanders, compared to only 3 per cent of male workers. Although the number of men taking a career break is increasing, they remain a small group. In this article the time use of men interrupting their careers full-time or part-time is compared to that of full-time working men, using representative time use data from 2004. Analyses show that a career break does not imply a reduced workload. Half of the men interrupting their career full-time do so to try out another job. Men who take part-time leave are mainly motivated by their desire for a better work and family life balance. About 80 per cent of the time they gain by working on a part-time basis is allocated to household and childcare activities. This suggests that encouraging men to work fewer hours could well be the best policy for achieving gender equality.

The Search for the Invisible 8 Hours: The Gendered use of Time in a Society with a High Labour Force Participation of Women

This paper investigates to what extent, and how, the use of time differs between men and women in a society and an age-group in which the gender gap in labour force participation is rapidly closing. It is found that the gender differences come about primarily through the division of labour. However, this gendered division of work, which co-exists with a high labour market participation, does not lead to a double workload for women. Different mechanisms that are important in both limiting the total workload and maintaining the gendered division of labour are analysed.

An unfinished job? The effect of subject choice and family formation processes on labour market outcomes of young men and women

Despite their generally higher educational attainment, young women are characterised by lower labour market positions than men in Belgium. Using regression and decomposition analyses on data from the longitudinal SONAR survey on the transition from school to work, we examine to what extent subject choice and processes of family formation can explain the gender differences on labour market positions at the age of 26 (N = 2060). We find that both subject choice and family formation influence labour market outcomes and that these factors can partially explain the gender gap. Both factors, however, differ in their interaction with gender. While subject choice has a similar effect for both men and women, family formation has a negative impact on the labour market position of women only.

Calculating the Social Rhythm Metric (SRM) and Examining Its Use in Interpersonal Social Rhythm Therapy (IPSRT) in a Healthy Population Study

In psychiatry, the social zeitgeber theory argues that social life provides important social cues that entrain circadian rhythms. Disturbance of these social cues might lead do dis-entrainment of circadian rhythms and evoke somatic symptoms that increase the risk of mood disorders. In preventing and treating patients with bipolar disorders, the Interpersonal and Social Rhythm Therapy (IPSRT) relies on the Social Rhythm Metric (SRM) to (re)establish patients’ social cues and an re-entrain circadian rhythms. Since the SRM quantifies social rhythms that are derived from a patient’s interaction with a social environment, this contribution (a) calculates the SRM of the social environment of a representative healthy population study (n = 1249), (b) evaluates the robustness of the SRM as a quantifier of social rhythms by matching the scores of the pilot study, revealing the near absence of variance across population characteristics and investigation months—circadian rhythms need to be entrained for every month and for everyone—and (c) examines its use in IPSRT by relating high SRM-scores to lower psychological distress (p = 0.004) and low SRM-scores to higher social and emotional dysfunction (p = 0.018).

Time Use and Well-being of Belgian Adolescents: Research Findings and Time Use Evidence

Abstract Promoting the well-being of young people is one of the main policy goals of youth policies in many Western countries. Yet a clear and distinct definition of the concept of well-being is not available. This paper discusses the measurement of well-being in Belgian youth research and factors influencing the well-being of adolescents. The paper also examines the time use of Belgian adolescents using data from the 1999 Belgian Time Use Survey, differentiating adolescents by gender, age, educational track and parents’ educational background. The time use of the 12- to 19-year olds attending secondary school is compared with the time use of the total population. Finally, we examine data about the subjective health of young people. Surveybased youth research stresses the growing importance of peers for the well-being of teens in late adolescence. This observation is supported by the analyses of time use data. Time use data show that boys engage more than girls in physically active leisure and games, while girls are more actively involved in what is sometimes labelled as “bedroom culture.” As adolescents grow up they are more involved in social leisure, spend less time at home and spend more time with peers. Seventy two percent of adolescents report that they are in very good health. These teenagers spend less time on computers, surfing the net and hobbies. They are less alone and spend more time in the company of others. The time use data reveal that the total workload of adolescents equals that of the population in general.

The impact of work and family responsibilities on healthy sleep habits

Healthy sleep habits include sufficient sleep, regular bedtimes and established sleep routines. The responsibilities of paid and unpaid work that arise during the daytime are assumed to haunt us at night as well, eventually affecting these sleep habits. A long-term comparison of sleep duration from 1966 and 1999 time-diary data shows that sleep duration has not declined to the large extent that is generally assumed. Moreover, analyses of timing of sleep and sleep routines using time-diary data from 1999 and 2004 also do not show much evidence of this assumed decline. On the contrary, increasing work and family responsibilities positively affect regular bedtimes and sleep routines.

Who works when? Towards a typology of weekly work patterns in Belgium

The question when people work is almost always reduced to the question how much people work on (non-)standard working hours. In this contribution, we applied optimal matching techniques using Belgian data from a weekly work grid (n = 6330) to identify individuals’ work timing patterns, offering a richer analytical approach than most previous studies on (non-)standard work time. Results show that such analysis captures much more and much more relevant variation in the timing of work than simple questions. Three general and 10 more detailed weekly work patterns are identified based on two dimensions of paid work: the number of hours worked and the percentage of hours worked on non-standard periods of time. Additional analyses show that men’s work patterns depend only on job characteristics. For women, work patterns are also explained by socio-economic factors including education, presence of working partner and presence of children.

If fathers care, how do they share? The temporal and spatial allocation of fathers’ time to parenting activities

Contemporary fatherhood comprises active parenting: emotional involvement and more time spent on parenting activities. The latter is often explained by fathers’ response to a higher demand for childcare as the result of mothers’ employment schedules. Whereas time-use surveys are widely used to analyze fathers’ parenting time, only a few studies fully exploit the contextual information present in time-diaries. This study does so to analyze the temporal and spatial allocation of fathers’ time spent on parenting activities. Belgian time-use data of intact families with at least one child under the age of 7 (n = 950) reveal that fathers’ rise in solo physical childcare comes at a cost: when mothers are present, fathers spend less time in both physical and interactive childcare. At the same time, ‘new fathers’ – fathers who share household work more equally with their partners – spend more time in childcare no matter what, whether solo or in the presence of children’s mothers.