Household activities, life cycle, and role allocation tests on data sets from Boston and Salt Lake City

Tests of four hypotheses relating to allocation of activities and time among household members are described using two data sets from two urban regions - Boston, Massachusetts, and Salt Lake City, Utah. The first hypothesis is a test of categorizing activities into groups of mandatory, flexible, and optional activities; this hypothesis is upheld by the data. The second hypothesis is a test of whether there are significant differences in the mean time allocations of activities among the life-cycle groups. It was found that the life-cycle groups that were used do provide a basis for identifying significantly different time allocations to different activities within all three groups of activities. The third hypothesis concerns the relative allocation of time by gender within households for optional and flexible activities, across the life-cycle groups. It was found that gender shows effects on time allocation, but these effects are limited to a few activities, and others show no such effects. The fourth hypothesis concerns the allocation of time by gender and working status. Again, it was found that, for some optional and flexible activities, there are significant differences both in working status and between genders within working status. However, the differences appear only for a subset of activities. Overall, the results show a high degree of similarity between Boston and Salt Lake City and also to an earlier set of tests on a much smaller subsample of Boston data.