John P. Robinson’s research while affiliated with Loyola University Maryland and other places

Recently much attention has been focused on whether the gender transformation of paid and unpaid work in society referred to as the gender revolution has hit a wall, or at least stalled. In this article, we discuss key trends in the gender division of labor across 13 developed countries over a 50-year period. These trends show little decisive evidence for a stall but rather a continuing, if uneven, long-term trend in the direction of greater gender equality. We set out a theoretical framework for understanding slow change in the division of unpaid work and care (lagged generational change). We argue that, through a long-term view of the processes of change, this framework can help address why progress in the convergence in paid and unpaid work promised by the gender revolution has been so slow.

An infographic reporting data from a 2014 survey of over 2100 U.S. employers in the government, for-profit, and not-for-profit sectors, in 49 states and DC. Also available at: http://tinyurl.com/LgDemandInfographic

This article presents the results of a 2014 survey of more than 2,100 U.S. employers on their requirements for multilingual employees. The survey found a significant discrepancy: On the one hand, 93% of respondents “value[d] employees who…are able to work effectively with customers, clients, and businesses from a range of different countries and cultures.” On the other, 66% of respondents reported identifying foreign language skills in the hiring process, 41% reported giving advantage to multilingual applicants, and only 10% of respondents indicated that new hires “needed to speak at least one language besides English.” In addition, the survey revealed employer characteristics related to demand for language ability: Industries with the greatest demand were government and public administration, information services, educational services, health care, and the administrative sector. Language skills were sought in combination with other skill sets, notably customer service, sales, vendor management, and marketing. Finally, the survey identified college majors sought in conjunction with foreign language ability. The study is unique in its size; its coverage of small, medium, and large businesses; and its focus on college recruitment and hiring. The results are critical to educational programs seeking to understand the value of language in the job market

Americans feel more stressed than ever, but data shows more free time and steadily high rates of happiness.

Taking a time-use perspective, this chapter examines where volunteering fits in people’s daily, weekly, and annual time use in different countries and world regions. Within a person’s total time-use pattern, the central focus is on free time and the portion within it that is devoted to volunteering and associational activity. Formal volunteering (FV), whether for service programs or associations, is most often a kind of serious leisure, defined below. Such activity has its own temporal requirements that have to be coordinated with other use of free time, as well as with paid work and non-work obligations (such as family care or personal care, like sleep). Informal volunteering (INV) — volunteering done more spontaneously by individuals without any organizational auspices — is also discussed, as is the travel related to FV and INV. Substantial attention is devoted to options in time-use measurement and methodology, and to the special value of such methods to enhance and overcome biases in survey interview methodology.

Academic and government researchers from most industrialized countries and an increasing number of developing countries are collecting and analyzing full 24-h time-diary data. These diary data provide a comprehensive and accurate basis for generating national accounts of time spent working, sleeping, and spending free time, and how daily life varies across demographic groups, across decades and across countries. Diaries can also provide data on multitasking, interacting with others, and the location and timing of daily activities in the American Time Use Survey and in more than 25 other (mainly European) counties. These diary data are being standardized and archived via the Multinational Time Use Survey at the University of Oxford.

The quality of life (QOL) or positive subjective benefits of the time people spent engaging in particular daily activities is often not obvious, although social observers seem to concur that increases in daily activities like child care, volunteering, and other potentially altruistic behaviors (as well as overall free time) represent improvements in a person's or society's QOL. In contrast, increases in time spent on routine housework, repair activities, and TV viewing are seen as less desirable. Nonetheless, it is helpful to have empirical support for many of these assumptions, and this is directly provided by the subjective time measures reviewed here.

Academic and government researchers from most industrialized countries and an increasing number of developing countries are collecting and analyzing full 24-hour time diary data. These diary data provide a comprehensive and accurate basis for generating national accounts of time spent working, sleeping and spending free time, and how daily life varies across demographic groups, across decades and across countries. Diaries can also provide data on multi-tasking, interacting with others and the location and timing of daily activities in the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) and in more than 25 other (mainly European) counties. These diary data are being standardized and archived via the Multinational Time Use Survey (MTUS) at the University of Oxford. Considerable progress has been made in producing tables of comparative time use in and across more than 20 countries and in identifying and visualizing patterns of multinational time use using Multidimensional Scaling (MDS). Major attention has been focused on uses of time in families, with special attention to the implications for our understanding of the division of paid and unpaid work within households. Given the richness of diary data available, less attention is now given to trends from time estimate questions, although brief mention is made here to useful estimates from the US General Social Survey (GSS) on important free-time activities and subjective time measures. In order to provide greater insight into the sociological meaning of these activities for national accounts, supplemental data have also been collected on subjective and qualitative characteristics of diary activities, such as enjoyment, stress and outcomes. Both in the US and other countries, diarists generally rate activities related to social life, religion and interactive childcare higher in enjoyment, and activities related to household upkeep and health care at the bottom. In more recent surveys, paid work activities and TV have received less positive ratings. Furthermore, recent US surveys indicate no increase in time pressure, a subjective factor that has been consistently related to lower life satisfaction. Fuller coverage of these ratings is covered in a separate entry in this volume titled Subjective Time. ABSTRACT

Three early studies of the impact of IT on American society suggested that it was having a negative impact on social life, as well as mass media use. This article reviews the results from two large multiyear US national surveys that have been monitoring social change in US daily life with high response rates: (1) the 1974–2012 General Social Survey (GSS; with more than 55,000 adult respondents aged 18+) and (2) the 2003–2011 American Time-Use Survey (ATUS; with more than 100,000 such respondents). The GSS has collected time-estimate data on particular social and media activities, while the ATUS surveys have collected complete 24-h diary accounts across a single day. Our analysis is conducted on two levels to determine whether various social/media activities have changed (1) at the aggregate societal level as new IT have diffused over the last 20 years and (2) among individuals who use these new media more. In both surveys, there seems little if any significant impact of these new media on social/media time, even though they had become the predominant source of information and social contact by 2004. GSS respondents in general have not reported lower levels of social or media contact since the 1990s, and while those GSS respondents who spent more time on the Internet did report fewer social visits with relatives, they reported more visits with friends, compared to those who do not use the Internet. The main difference between users and nonusers in the ATUS was with time at paid work, and that was only partially explained by higher Internet use by teens and on days off from work. For reading and certain other behaviors, Internet use was sometimes associated with increased use in these surveys. Moreover, no consistent decline in either social or media activities was found in either survey across this period of Internet diffusion, much in line with the earlier national studies. At the same time, it seems clear that not only the ATUS but diary studies in other countries are failing to capture the significant social impact of IT on the rest of life in the new digital age.

One of the notable innovations in social-science methodology developed during the 1960s was Multi- Dimensional Scaling (MDS). MDS made it possible for social scientists to discover, uncover or model the underlying spatial structure of relations between various social collectives (like countries or communities), social objects (like music or artifacts) or social attitudes. One early application of MDS described the dimensional contours of Americans' views of other countries in terms of "perceptual maps of the world". More recently, it has been used to map country differences in the World Values Survey. Spurred by its initial successful applications, MDS was extended to time-diary data collected in the pioneering 1965 Multinational Time-Budget Study, in which it again provided insightful portrayals of daily activity across the 15 national settings in that study. This present article updates and extends these results by applying MDS methods to the most recent diary collection in the Oxford University MTUS data archive - covering more than 20 (mainly European) countries. Once again, the result was plausible (but somewhat different) configurations again emerged from MDS visualizations. Moreover, these mappings were compatible with conclusions from the 1965 mapping and with earlier more conventional analyses.