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Primary Submission Category: Race/Ethnicity
Measuring racialized temporal inequality: Daily time use and the emotional meaning of daily activities
Authors: Linnea Evans,
Presenting Author: Linnea Evans*
Time is increasingly recognized as a social resource inequitably distributed across ethnoracial groups, with implications for mobility, stress, and health. Yet group differences in time use are often interpreted as reflecting individual values rather than structural racism and racialization processes. Drawing on racialized time theory and intersectionality frameworks, this study examines variation in daily time use and its emotional experience across ethnoracial and gender groups among U.S. adults. I analyze data from 2009-2019 American Time Use Survey and affect data from the ATUS wellbeing modules for White, Black, and Hispanic adults aged 18-64 (n=80,922), across contracted, committed, necessary, and free time domains. Ethnoracial differences in daily time are meaningful and vary by gender, yet are often obscured by aggregate categories. White adults spent more time in active and entertainment leisure and non-core household tasks. Hispanic women devoted substantially more time to core domestic work and caregiving. Black adults reported more downtime, but less time in entertainment leisure, ad experienced the least time eating. Black men reported significantly less paid work time, largely reflecting employment disparities. Sociodemographic adjustment narrowed by did not eliminate these differences. Using the wellbeing module, I examined group differences in the emotional. Experience of time via the unpleasantness index (U-index). Race-specific U-indices revealed that minoritized groups rated institutional interactions – financial, medical, and government services as more unpleasant, while reporting more positive experiences during leisure. Overall daily unpleasantness varied modestly across groups, though Hispanic women consistently reported more. Results differed by whether aggregate or race-specific indices were applied, highlighting the importance of measure choice. A planned third stage will incorporate state-level structural racism indicators to examine macro-social drivers of these patterns.