Page 388 - Contributed Paper Session (CPS) - Volume 6

CPS1993 Asmae Mhmmoudi
2. Recording housework time in the National Time Use Survey
The National Time Use Survey carried out in 2012 is the second survey of
this type, after a first one in 1997 covering only women. In that second survey,
women, men and children are all involved. Data were collected during a whole
year and each participant was asked to cite their activities for a day. Activities
were subsequently coded according to a list with more than 550 activity codes.
The following activities are categorized as housework: Food preparation and
serving, cleaning and upkeep of dwelling and surroundings, doing laundry,
wood chopping and water fetching, maintenance and small repairs, purchases
for the households, gardening activities and household management. Care
provided within children aged less than 15 years constitutes, however, a far
more central part of the daily activities of household members. Hence, it would
be appropriate to include childcare into housework participation’s
measurement.
The main focus here is to study couple’s time allocation to unpaid work.
However, the National Time Use Survey (2012) collected diaries of women and
men of any marital status. As such, the primary exercise is to construct a data
base of couples that contain all the information required to investigate
couple’s time allocation without any influence of other factors. So that, the
analysis is restricted to nuclear households, i.e. couples living with or without
children.

3. Estimation method
In the econometric analysis, three allocations of time are estimated: the
total time spent on unpaid work, housework and childcare. However, while
each individual completed the time use diary for a single day, it is possible that
in that particular day the person doesn’t accomplish any activity of housework
or childcare. This is particularly the case of Moroccan men for whom
housework and childcare activities are rarely performed. Consequently, these
variables contain many zeros. Hence, distributions are censored and in this
case OLS estimation is not relevant. In such case of censored distribution,
limited dependant variable models are mostly used. Specifically, in this paper
a Tobit model is used for the estimation.
The econometric framework in this study focused on time spent by couples
on unpaid work. In the first part of the analysis, the dependent variable is
defined as the total time spent on housework and childcare jointly and
analyzed according to place of residence for both women and men. In the
second part of the analysis, the time spent caring for children and the time
spent doing housework are analyzed separately. For all estimations R.3.4.1 is
used.

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