Joeri Minnen

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.

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).

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.

Spatial and temporal fluctuations in individual accessibility: a comparative analysis among subgroups of the population

In recent years, there has been a growing interest among urban and transport planners in the accessibility levels of different societal groups within an urban region. The interest stems in part from the concern that inadequate spatial and temporal planning may foster social exclusion by giving rise to accessibility limitations that bear disproportionately on certain population groups. This paper proposes and implements person-based, time-specific indicators of accessibility. It will be shown how such indicators may help increase our understanding of how spatial patterns of accessibility of subgroups within the city evolve over time as a consequence of differences in space-time constraints. Unlike earlier studies of person-based accessibility, subgroup differences in accessibility will be measured during multiple time intervals over an entire week, using longitudinal activity-travel diaries and a time use survey. Our study shows that, within the city of Ghent (Belgium), male and female adults living with a different occupational status (i.e. full-time, part-time and unemployed) may experience significantly different levels of accessibility during the diurnal cycle as a consequence of variation in their time use patterns.

Exploring the stable practices of everyday life: A multi-day time-diary approach

Everyday life is neither the result of mundane, common-sense, habitual human behaviour as theorized by the agency-centred approach of methodological individualism nor the sheer result of the conformation to temporal norms of the structural approach of social holism. In fact, everyday life is marked by a rhythmic, temporal structure that is brought into effect by the modality of repetitive action. In this article, a praxeological approach is used to conceptualize everyday life as a social structure in terms of its underlying stable practices. Multi-day time-diary data and optimal matching with clustering techniques show empirically that everyday life consists of stable practices that vary in function of temporal and social demands, in function of handling coordination of practice, and in function of embedding these practices in collectively shared temporal orders.

Active work, passive leisure? Associations between occupational and non-occupational physical activity on weekdays

Research from recent years reports that physical inactivity is a major risk factor for global mortality. Several societal trends in the last decades are likely to have contributed to the increasing prevalence of sedentary lifestyles. Physical activity throughout the day has become much less self-evident and much more a matter of personal effort. Its presumed discretionary character made leisure the time par excellence to compensate for daily inactivity in non-discretionary time. The historical dichotomy of leisure and paid work led to a large body of research assessing the association between occupational and non-occupational physical activity, almost always equated with leisure time physical activity. This study investigates the relationship between occupational and non-occupational physical activity and adds to existing knowledge by breaking down non-occupational physical activity to physical activity in different non-occupational domains of life. Using Belgian time-use data from 2013 coupled with metabolic equivalent of task scores, reveals no direct association between occupational physical activity and physical activity in the domains of leisure, household work and family care, and transport on weekdays after controlling for sociodemographic characteristics. The association between womens occupational physical activity and physical activity in household work and family care is the sole exception. The results suggest that a holistic, naturalistic approach to physical activity taking into account that individuals have to synchronize needs other than paid work (e.g. reproductive and social productive needs) with the institutional and cultural temporal structures of the society they live in, is more appropriate.