While the campaign for keeping British Summer Time – and the longer lighter evenings – is likely to hot up again after the election, wth renewed backing from the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, the impact of losing an hour of lie-in may be causing extra anguish to the nation’s families as the clocks change this weekend.
According to a new study from the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg in Germany, analysing data from ISER’s huge study of the UK population over time, Understanding Society and the comparable German Socio-Economic Panel study, people’s life satisfaction declines when they lose an hour to daylight savings time.
Using the Life Satisfaction Approach to Value Daylight Savings Time Transitions: Evidence from Britain and Germany looked at how life satisfaction changes immediately after the clocks go forward.
Researchers Daniel Kühnle and Christoph Wunder found that those with little ones found the time change harder than most.
“For both the UK and Germany, individuals with young children in the household respond the most strongly to the spring transition.
“Individuals with older children do not respond as strongly, and neither do those without children in the household,”
Setting clocks back again in the autumn has no measurable effects on satisfaction.
The decline is especially pronounced among parents of young children. The second week after losing an hour to daylight savings, life satisfaction returns to its original levels.
For Germany, this means that household income would have to rise by around 10 percent in the first week after the start of daylight savings to compensate for the estimated decline in satisfaction.
The authors explain the temporary decline in satisfaction not only through the physical adaptation to a new daily rhythm.
“People experience it as a strain when they lose free time,” says one of the study’s authors, Daniel Kühnle. “This is especially true of parents, who have little time to themselves as it is.”
The researchers do not argue for eliminating daylight savings time, however. They suggest “making up” for the lost hour by giving people more freedom to decide how to allocate their time. “One possibility would be to make working hours more flexible the week when clocks are set forward,” says Daniel Kühnle.
For their representative study on Germany and the UK, Kühnle and Wunder used data on 29,653 male and female SOEP respondents from 1984 to 2004, and 8,950 Understanding Society respondents from 2009 to 2012. The study used data collected from respondents two weeks before and two weeks after the beginning and end of daylight savings time.
Daylight savings time was introduced in 1916. The lobby group Lighter Later have been campaigning to end the annual end of British Summer Time and to keep lighter evenings in the UK for longer in the year. This would prevent road accidents, increase leisure time and boost the economy. It now seems that it would also help families with young children avoid an annual dip in lifes satisfaction.