There has been little research conducted looking at how young people in
the UK spend their time, and how this time may be affected by their
parents. Against a backdrop of increasing concern about anti-social
behaviour, young people’s time use, and interaction with their parents can
provide a useful source of information, which could inform a wide range of
social policy. This paper focuses on four activities that young people
(aged 8 – 18 years) in lone mother and two parent households may engage in
throughout the day. These activities are playing indoor games, watching
TV, reading and doing domestic chores. Taken together these activities
form a broad spectrum of the general types of activity a person engages
in. The paper analyses the effects of the young person’s age and gender on
their engagement in these activities. It also analyses the effects of
their parent’s education, employment status and occupation. In most
respects the results echo those from other research. Further to this the
paper attempts to gauge the extent to which young people’s engagement in
these activities is affected by their parent’s engagement in these
activities. I find that engagement in these activities is positively
affected by a parent’s engagement, if the young person is at the same
location whilst their parents are doing the activity, giving weight to the
proposition that parent’s actions are very important. The research employs
a novel methodology for analysing time use data; in that the dependent
variable is the number of times a young person does an activity throughout
the day, as opposed to the total quantity of time. In other words, the
dependent variable is a count variable, and is analysed as such. It is
argued that this approach is one that has considerable potential in future
time use research.
Presented by:
Killian Mullan (ISER)
Date & time:
November 29, 2006 1:00 pm - November 29, 2006 12:00 am
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