Unequal Childhoods - Annette Lareau [203]
The CDS is distinctive because it includes time diaries. These are lists of all the activities carried out by each child, from midnight to midnight (i.e., a 24-hour period), on a randomly chosen weekday and a randomly chosen weekend day. The diaries also include the starting and ending times of each activity. (Parents assisted their children in filling out the diaries, following careful instructions provided by the agency directing data collection.) Because the entries for each day must sum to 24 hours, time diaries are widely considered to be more accurate than questionnaire data. When people fill out questionnaires, they often overestimate how much time they normally spend doing activities that are considered socially desirable (exercising, for example, or reading). The structure of time diaries reduces this kind of inaccuracy.4
In conducting our analysis of the data, we began with a basic assumption, namely that children’s time diaries provide insight into what the children themselves do, as well as into their parents’ child-rearing strategies. Our analytical goal was to determine whether the PSID-CDS data exhibit patterns consistent with the concepts of concerted cultivation and natural growth reported in Unequal Childhoods. Therefore, using information on a subset of children in the CDS aged six to twelve, we constructed measures from the time diaries of the amount of time each child devoted to two key types of activities: organized activities and non-organized leisure (i.e., “hanging out”). We also measured the amount of time each child spent in the presence of extended kin. Each of these measures corresponds to a key finding from the ethnography. Once we had developed the measures, we looked to see what other characteristics of the sample they correlated with. For example, while we did not have a measure of occupational conditions available that conformed to the one used in the book, we did have various “proxy” measures—including family income, family wealth, and maternal educational attainment—which are often used by quantitative social scientists. As the ethnographic data in the first edition suggested, we found that each of these proxy measures is significantly associated with children’s time use. Children whose mothers have more education (i.e., middle-class children) spend more time in organized activities, less time hanging out, and less time with extended kin than children whose mothers have lower levels of education (i.e., working-class children). We obtained similar results for family income and wealth.
The final step of the analysis was to determine whether these associations persisted when we carried out multivariate regressions. This statistical procedure makes it possible to examine the association between a pair of variables (such as mother’s level of education and the amount of time children spend hanging out) while simultaneously holding constant (i.e., controlling for) other variables, such as age, race, or income. The goal here is to determine whether the association between the variables of interest exists among individuals who are also comparable to one another in other important respects. So, if we are concerned with the relationship between the amount of education mothers have and the amount of time their children spend hanging out, we would want to control for various factors that might also be related to hanging out—things such as age, gender, race, family structure (single-parent or two-parent), mother’s work status, and so forth. Essentially, multivariate regression analysis enables us to isolate the predictive power of mother’s education.