Cap 5

A. QUALITY OF LIFE

5

Methods and Conceptsfor Time-Budget Research

on Elders

M. Powell Lawton

INTRODUCTION

Because the early classics of time-budget research excluded elders(Chapin, 1974; Robinson, 1977; Szalai, 1972), the past decade has seen somecatching-up research. Fortunately, many more recent major studies (Juster& Stafford, 1985, and all those reported in the chapters of Altergott, 1988)have included people over 60, and some have gone well into the period ofold-old age (Harvey & Singleton, 1989). Other studies of specializedgroups of elders have also enlarged our view of different varieties of agingin industrialized societies. Carp (1978–1979) was the first to use time-diarymethods to study older people in public housing. Moss and Lawton (1982)contrasted community-resident normal elders, public housing tenants, in-home service recipients, and institutional applicants. Preretired and re-

tired people were compared by Zuzanek and Box (1988). Altergott (1985)studied the ecology of marital companionship, and Larson, Zuzanek, and

M. Powell Lawton Polisher Research Institute, Philadelphia Geriatric Center, Phila-

delphia, Pennsylvania 19141.

Time Use Research in the Social Sciences, edited by Wendy E. Pentland, Andrew S. Harvey, M.

Powell Lawton, and Mary Ann McColl. Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, New York,

1999.107

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108 M. POWELL LAWTON

Mannell (1985) studied the ecology of being alone. Subcultural variationwas studied in Ujimoto's (1985, 1988) reports on contrasts among first-generation, second-generation, and relocated Japanese Canadians.

Aside from these studies of special groups, the emphasis in most ofthe research on time use by elders has been on variations associated withthe major life statuses, especially gender, marital status /living arrange-ment, and income. The present chapter has three purposes. Commentaryon methodological issues of time use study with elders begins the chapter.Some conceptual issues relevant to the study of time use in relation toquality of life research are then introduced. Finally, illustrations are pro-vided from research by the author and his colleagues, including recentresearch on the process of caregiving for a cognitively impaired elder.

METHODOLOGICAL ISSUES

Little (1984) provided methodological guidance to people doing time-budget research on elders. In fact, her contribution emphasized conceptualissues more than the details of methods. Empirical studies addressing thereliability and validity of time-budget methods used with elders wereprovided by Carp and Carp (1981) and by Stephens and Norris-Baker(1984). In general, these approaches to assessing data quality support theability of both self-generated time diaries and retrospective reconstruc-tions of activities over recent time to reflect reality as seen from otherperspectives. One portion of the Carps' research contrasts the two majorapproaches to studying time use—the self-generated time diary and theyesterday interview. Extended discussion of these two methods follows.

The Ideal Form for Studying Time Use

The major forms for studying time use are the self-chronicled timediary and the yesterday interview. In the time diary, the subject is respon-sible for making each entry. In this approach, it is relatively easy to collectdata on multiple days, such as a full calendar week or multiple dayssampling seasons or other activity-related periods. The advantages ofusing many days are great: Estimates become more representative, stable,and capable of capturing rare activities as replications increase. One also gains the ability to contrast work days, weekends, holidays, or seasons, to name only a few examples. The time diary's disadvantages include lowersubject compliance, missed occasions, undependable completion times, and a variety of response errors, many stemming from the cognitive

METHODS AND CONCEPTS FOR TIME-BUDGET RESEARCH ON ELDERS 109

demands of following an unfamiliar form and the burden of the initiativeplaced on the respondent.

The yesterday interview is a structured procedure that leads the subjectthrough each time period of the immediately past 24-hour day to recordactivity and other descriptors of time use. The time period covered and thetime of reporting are exactly known, and the interviewer can make certainthat there are no inadvertent omissions. Disadvantages are that each dayrequires a person-to-person interview and that the day must be recon-structed from recent memory rather than being reported as it unfolds.

The relevance of age to choice between these two forms is not totallyclear. Weeklong diaries were used by Carp (1978–1979) and Ujimoto (1988).Shorter, self-generated time diaries were used in Finnish (Niemi, Kiiski, &Liikkanen, 1979) and Norwegian studies (cited in Anderson, 1988). Theseinvestigators have thus demonstrated that elders can produce self-chronicledtime diaries for multiple days.

Exhaustive research on the reliability and validity of various ap-proaches to time-budget study was provided for the population at large(Juster & Stafford, 1985), with an affirmation of the quality of data gatheredby all methods. For elders specifically, Carp and Carp (1981) examined theextent to which (1) a yesterday interview reproduced the time use profilegenerated by a 1-week diary, and (2) the extent to which the first day of the1-week diary reproduced the remaining 6-day estimates. Neither 1-daymethod correlated well with the longer diary (most of the most-frequentactivities correlated significantly and moderately highly in their two esti-mates, however, suggesting that low prevalence constituted part of theproblem. Longer diaries of course, yield better estimates of rare activities).The Carps concluded that the 7-day diary is preferable, despite its highrejection rate. It is important to note, however, that yesterday and 1-daydiaries were not compared to any external standard (e.g., direct observa-tions, judgments of other reporters, or estimates from other records, suchas attendance lists) but only to the 7- or 6-day diary. Thus, some of the lackof concordance between the two contrasted methods probably confounded1-day error and error inherent in the diary method. Further research isnecessary to untangle the correct ascriptions of error.

The majority of studies involving the aged have been performedusing the yesterday interview. The University of Michigan's major U.S.

population survey (Juster & Stafford, 1985) used a sample of four yester-days done at different times of year to enhance the representativeness of the estimates. The methodological conclusion from this study, however, was that "a 24-hour time diary [yesterday interview] of activities on theday preceding the interview was the simplest and most cost effective method of measuring actual time use" (Juster & Stafford, 1985, p. 516).


Potential Age-Related Sources of Error

It is hazardous to assume automatically that age leads to error insocial research generally. For example, Carp and Carp (1981) found thatage was not associated with completion rates for a transportation diary.Accuracy of factual information given to structured interview questionswas not associated with age (Rodgers & Herzog, 1987). Conversely, otherindicators of poorer quality response have been seen in a stronger effect ofquestion format (method variance) on survey responses of elders (Rodgers,Herzog, & Andrews, 1988). Older people were more likely to refuse awhole interview or specific questions, including giving "don't know"responses (Colsher & Wallace, 1989; Herzog & Rodgers, 1983; Herzog, Rodgers, & Kulka, 1983) and socially desirable responses (Campbell, Con-verse, & Rodgers, 1976). Response inconsistencies were more frequent among older men (Colsher & Wallace, (1989).

Despite the weight of this evidence that response error may be greater among elders, it is well-known that age in our society is also a proxy for many biological (e.g., physical health) and social factors (e.g., recency of education) that may be related to response quality. Thus, it is of interest that the self-generated travel-diary study (Carp & Carp, 1981) found that low education, low reading ability, low income, minority status, and poor health were associated with lack of completion of the diary, despite the ability of all subjects to complete a structured interview.

Some of these error-producing factors will clearly affect elders selec-tively. Not all such factors have been studied in relation to the validity of research data among elders specifically. Nonetheless, it is very clear that poor health, sensory impairments, cognitive impairment, poor education, lack of practice of cognitive skills, handwriting limitations, energy limita-tions, and other problems that are not intrinsic to old age but are correlated with chronological age will limit the validity of many forms of research data.

It seems very likely that the self-generated time diary will be more strongly affected by these age-related barriers to completion than will the yesterday interview. Although there is no research to guide us on this suggestion, it seems worth the hypothesis that age-correlated limitations of this type act hierarchically in their effect on response quality. If the time diary is the most difficult task, a subject with some of these limitations may be unwilling to complete the time diary despite having been successfully interviewed. The literature seems to suggest that this self-screening is reasonably successful. For example, the Carps' study affirmed the validityof time-diary material among those who complied. For those willing to take on the task, the seriousness of response errors may be less damaging exactly because of their prior self-screening. Nonetheless, systematic in-


vestigation of the effects of such limitations on diaries remains to beperformed.

The high level of self-selection bias in eligible subject populationsoccasioned by a request to do the time diary has been well documented.More than 35 years ago, Foote (1961) made the informal estimate that up to80% or 90% of older subjects refused time diaries. Unfortunately, manyresearch reports do not include the successful completion rate, despiteFoote's plea that this knowledge is essential for the interpretation of ourdata. Aside from the Carps' trip-diary data, no estimates of refusal ratesacross the age span have been located; these data could easily be assem-bled from a number of the large national surveys. Some all-ages refusalrates include 36% for the 1965–1966 Michigan telephone survey study(Robinson, 1977), 28% for the similar 1975–1976 Michigan study (Juster &Stafford, 1985), 18% from the 1979 Finland study (Niemi et al., 1979), 42%and 12%, respectively, from Norwegian and Swedish studies cited byAndersson (1988), and 40% for the Canadian Time Use Pilot telephonesurvey (Harvey & Singleton, 1989). By contrast, in the few reported studiesof elders, Moss and Lawton (1982) obtained yesterday interviews from88% of elders who had been successfully interviewed, but only 48% of thesame interviewed sample provided usable 2-day self-recorded time di-aries. One-week self-recorded time diaries were obtained from 73% and61% of elders age 60 and over from two cities studied by the Carps (1981).Part of the difference between completion rates for these two studies, butprobably not all of it, lies in the much higher prevalence of frail subjects inthe Moss and Lawton sample.

There is thus wide variation and considerable overlap in completionrates both when elder samples are compared to those from the generalpopulation, and when yesterday and diary methods are compared. Com-pletion rates may become even more problematic among subgroups ofelder people. In the next section, the implications of such missing seg-ments are discussed.

Subject-Selection Biases in Time-Budget Research with Elders

The preceding sections have indicated some of the subject characteris-tics that may be associated with completion rates or propensities to error in time studies. These same characteristics are thus among the many factors that may account for biases in reported research results. Such biases in turn may lead to major deficiencies in the useful knowledge base for services, social, health, and economic planning. I suggest, first, that we must be aware of such deficiencies, and, second, that alternative means be sought to fill the void.


Knowledge regarding deprived subgroups has been a great help inplanning services for elders. Data from the United States indicate, forexample, that about 20% of the 65+ population has one or more impair-ments in activities of daily living (ADL; National Center for Health Statis-tics, 1987). Measures of such ADL deficiencies in turn, are the most potentpredictors of future states, such as death, institutionalization, and acutehospitalization (Manton, 1988). Similarly, national or other large-scale dataare available that measure the prevalence of dementing illness, hearingdeficits, visual problems, and a variety of clinically diagnosed illnesses.Such benchmark data lead directly to ameliorative measures in health careand rehabilitation.

Similarly, other national data on poverty, race, education, maritalstatus, place of residence, and living arrangement may inform economicplanning. Planning for social and psychological needs requires differentindicators. Tie allocation data have been especially useful for this purpose.

With elders, however, the very subgroups whose needs and unmetneeds are probably greatest are the ones at greatest risk of being omittedfrom population estimates of time use. Considering the many personaland social statuses associated with noncompletion of time-budget data,our estimates of time uses of elders seem heavily biased toward thehealthy, economically privileged, and cognitively intact. We may be pro-viding especially rosy estimates of the well-being of elders if we considerthe single and compounded exclusions of impaired, rural, poor, and mi-nority aged from our samples.

No amount of diligence in recruitment for time-budget studies willsolve this problem. In fact, Herzog and Rodgers (1983) speculated thatskilled interviewing techniques that raise the interview recruitment rateand the response rate for individual questions may in fact be adding errorvariance. Interviewers of lesser skill would produce lower overall re-sponse rates but end up with a greater proportion of true variance. Otherpossibilities for increasing our knowledge of the time allocations of ne-glected subgroups must therefore be devised.

Most methods other than those that attempt to track activities acrosstime are even more difficult or error-prone than traditional time budgets.What Robinson (1985) called "stylized estimates of time use" —subject-estimated aggregates of total time or total frequency of an activity over aspecified time period—have been questioned in terms of their validity (Carp & Carp, 1981; Juster & Stafford, 1985). The experience sampling method (ESM; Csikszentmihalyi & Larson, 1987), where subjects indicate their activity at the moment a randomly programmed beeper sounds, is even more burdensome and therefore generates high rejection rates. Event


reporting (Tennen, Suls, & Affleck, 1991) requests highlighted happeningsof a day but does not attempt to reconstruct a continuous time period andtherefore is not a substitute for a time budget. The many forms of directbehavior observation, in addition to being very time-intensive, are appro-priate only in situations such as that in an institution, where most behavioris open to public view.

Proxy Time Budgets

The major possible alternative to a traditional time use record for people who cannot respond for themselves has been attempted very infre-quently: the time diary, or yesterday interview by proxy. For exactly the reasons dealing with lack of ability to respond, cited earlier, proxy report-ing to structured questions has been a familiar component of survey research. For example, all the major health surveys performed by the U.S. Bureau of the Census and the National Center for Health Statistics ask an informant to provide data when a sampled individual cannot respond to the interview. There are clearly problems with proxy data and especially with mixing subject and proxy data, which recent research is investigating (Magaziner, 1992; Rodgers, 1988). Many sources of bias cannot be modified by the use of proxies, but there are some instances in which proxy report-ing can fill gaps. A notably promising example is the case of a physically or cognitively impaired person who is under the care of another, more com-petent person, such as a caregiving spouse, household member, or hired companion. Proxy data are obviously more suited to factual material of the type usually included in activity taxonomies than to subjective processes. Even in these cases, however, there has been some exploration of ratings of cognitive (Edwards & Danziger, 1982) and affective (Lawton, Moss, & Glicksman, 1990) aspects of the daily lives of impaired persons by care-givers.

To have more detailed information about how chronically ill, home-bound, and cognitively impaired elders spend their days would be ex-tremely useful in planning services and programs. Our policies tend to be governed by highly generalized, often simplistic assumptions about how such impaired persons live. A good example is the generalization that most people would rather be at home than in an institution. Yet we know relatively little about what life is like for the chronically ill older person at home. A major question would compare the relative degrees of stimula-tion, support, social interaction, and other desirable qualities encountered in one's own community residence with that in a planned residence or institution.

M. POWELL LAWTON 114

Study of Chronic Impairment Using Proxy Data

Moss, other colleagues, and I studied caregivers of severely impaired elders who were still living in the community but were awaiting admis-sion to an institution. This group of elders thus represents one of the mostimpaired of all community-resident elders. We studied the caregiver's time allocations twice, the second occasion coming at a time when about half of the elders had been admitted to a nursing home (Moss, Lawton, Kleban, & Duhamel, 1993). Part of our research was concerned with the time use of the impaired person (Lawton, Moss, & Duhamel, 1995). Al-though we always attempted to administer a yesterday interview to the impaired elder, only a small handful of the 116 elders who were studied could provide their own yesterday time budgets. Thus, if anything were to be learned about the daily life of such people living in community resi-dences, the information would have to be derived from a proxy interview.

There are many problems associated with proxy responses to a yester-day interview. It goes without saying that even household members who are providing care and surveillance would not be able to account accu-rately for as much of another person's time as they would their own. Ifqualitative judgments were required, the proxy reporter would be even less dependable as an accurate judge of the care receiver’s subjective state. Another problem is the variable proportions of the day for which care-givers have knowledge. We found that despite major caregiving respon-sibilities such as those we studied, caregivers were often able to leave the home during the day. Substitute caregivers could have been other house-hold members, relatives who did not live in the home, or paid help. In any case, there was the major methodological problem of accounting for care receiver time in the absence of the caregiver–observer. We therefore first established an eligibility criterion for inclusion in the analyses, a minimum period of 4 hours of the waking day during which the caregiver was in the home with the care receiver. No attempt was made to determine what the impaired elder was doing while the caregiver was away. With variable-length absences of the caregiver, it was difficult to compare across subjects. The data thus were analyzed descriptively in terms of time allocations expressed as percentages of the accounted-for waking day (i.e., the total hours in the home ascribed to a codable activity., mean exactly 14 hours). Almost three-fourths of all caregivers were out of the home at some point, and their mean time away was 4.5 hours.

Figure 5.1 shows the percentage time allocations per day. It can be seen that receiving assistance from the caregiver consumed more of the day than did self-performed obligatory activities. By far, the greatest por-tion of the day was spent in the most passive of activities, rest and


Assistancefromcaregiver

Obligatoryactivities

Perseverativebehavior

Familyand friends

Rest

Television

Other

and radio

discretionary

Figure 5.1. Percentage distributions of impaired elders' time allocation for the waking day(from Lawton, Moss, & Duhamel, 1995, p. 159. Copyright, Southern Gerontological Society,

reprinted with permission).

television/radio. The social context was primarily one of being alone (56%of the accounted-for day) and with the caregiver (29%). About 37% of theday was spent in bed and another 24% of the day in the bedroom, but notin bed, and only 4% anywhere outside the elder’s home. We made an effortto get information on the quality of daily life first by asking what activityhad given special pleasure to the impaired elder in the past month—51%of the caregivers could think of nothing. For the day of record, 30% couldnot name a best or worst occasion of the day. The bottom line of the storytold by these data is the relative deprivation and stimulus-poor quality ofimpaired elders' days. On the positive side, the data tell much about thepossibilities for increasing stimulation by arranging to have other people come in, deliberately helping the elder to use different rooms within the house or to leave the house, and especially the possibilities for training in-home service personnel to introduce enriching activities with the elder while they are in the home for more functional purposes.

Despite the increased possibility for error in using proxy time bud-gets, there is ample research justification to persist in the effort. Such use must be coupled with a call for methodological research designed to


specify the conditions and domains particularly well-suited and ill-suitedfor the proxy interview.

Activity Classification (Coding) Biases

A very different type of bias is introduced by the researcher's choiceof activity classifications for coding reported behaviors and, more gener-ally, the level of abstraction in which the activity classes fall. In her studiesof cognitive structures or prototypes, Rosch (1973) found three levels ofabstraction: the superordinate, the basic, and the subordinate. The super-ordinate describes a class in the most abstract terms. This level is mostoften defined in terms of operational classes, which is the basic level. Basicclasses represent the everyday terms used to name a group of objects. Thesubordinate level represents the most specific level of object definition. Thesuperordinate level is most efficient in conveying maximum informationabout the largest number of members of the universe using the fewestcategories. The subordinate level conveys the most information about asingle member of the class. In between, the basic level contains the most-used natural-language terms that represent an optimal compromise be-tween breadth and denotative specificity. Normally, the number of basiccategories applied in time budgets range from 11 to 40 and are familiarcategories such as paid work, housework, transportation, social inter-action, and so on. These categories refer to the basic levels, while termssuch as "obligatory" and "discretionary" are at the superordinate level.Using the basic rather than the subordinate level for most time-budgetanalyses is necessary both because our ability to comprehend many more categories simultaneously is limited and also because the number of sub-jects in many studies has not been large enough to provide a sufficient number of instances unless we aggregate them at the basic level.

The loss involved in using such aggregation is substantial, however. When reflected by time allocations at the superordinate and even the basiclevel of classification, lifestyle seems to be relatively inelastic. The struc-tural constraints on time allocation occasioned by human biology, eco-nomics, and social structure are such that changes in time allocation across basic categories appear to be relatively small, even with major changes in status such as retirement or the institutionalization of a dependent elder (Moss et al., 1993). The latter research did show significant increases in indicators of "quality time" at the basic classification level: recreation,family interaction, and time outside the home. Yet, of the approximately 100 minutes per day of time "saved" in caregiving after the elder wasinstitutionalized, this time was distributed over six obligatory activity categories and three discretionary categories (in addition to recreation),


none of these increases being significant individually. In fact, a profile oftime allocations for an individual gives a very drab and depersonalizedpicture of the person's life. In terms often used to illustrate the Roschhierarchy, furniture and chairs (superordinate and basic categories), be-cause they are in most people's houses, are fitting descriptors of aggre-gates, but we learn more about the person if we know she has a Windsorchair, a reclining chair, and so on. This point was illustrated by Stone andNicolson (1987), who analyzed cross-nationally, relatively infrequent, butspecific activities such as doing laundry and transporting children. Thedifference observed afforded enlightening contrasts between socialist andnonsocialist countries.

Few studies can produce the 640,000 activity units of the Multina-tional Time Budget Study (Szalai, 1972) used by Stone and Nicolson.However, when specific groups are under study, a search should be madefor categories that give uniqueness to elders' lifestyle and also occurfrequently enough to be analyzed. One form of such activity is help withpersonal care given by a caregiver or received by an impaired elder.Because we know so little about the specifics of uplifting activities per-formed by elders, more individual categories for leisure activities andsocial behaviors are desirable, for example, watching television news orvisiting a friend, as contrasted with basic-level categorizations such as"leisure" and "social interaction."

PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF TIME USE

The search for more individually meaningful characterizations of the objective varieties of time use represents one aspect of a psychologicalconception of time use. This aspect of the time budget has been somewhat neglected in the literature to date. An even more neglected aspect of time use, which is a major theme of this book, is the psychological function oftime use and its relationship to quality of life. The final conceptual portion of this presentation deals with concepts of subjectivity, meaning, and individual quality of life as gained through the way time is used (see also Michelson, Chapter 4).

One of the most appealing aspects of the use of time is that such uses are relatively objective; that is, an observer could theoretically categorize a person's overt activities in a reasonably similar way to that of other ob-servers or the behaver him- or herself. The basic classifications used in time-budget studies are objective in this sense and therefore in the aggre-gate represent what large numbers of people do. As has been mentioned before, such objective data are necessary for social planning.


There is intrinsic tension, however, between the significance of an activity in objective, aggregated form versus its significance to an individ-ual. This is a familiar dualism in the study of stress: Is a particular life event, for example, residential relocation, to be considered a stressor auto-matically or does its stressful quality depend on its appraised meaning to the person? The realistic answer works both ways. On a statistical basis, relocation as an objective event may be shown in a probabilistic sense to be a stressor for vulnerable elders (Schulz & Brenner, 1977). Because many other people find relocation felicitous and still others are nonreactive, if we wish to understand an individual, we need to inquire further about the subjective meaning and particular circumstances of the relocation.

Zuzanek and Box (1988) have called our attention to an interesting contrast. When time spent in different activities was correlated with life satisfaction, very little relationship between the two was found. Moss and I (Lawton, Moss, & Fulcomer, 1986–1987) also found minimal relationships between time allocation and our measure of psychological adjustment. By contrast, using the mode of stylized estimates (i.e., "usual" frequencies ofparticipation, Robinson, 1985), people who reported a number of leisure-time behaviors more frequently showed higher life satisfaction (see Zuza-nek & Box, 1988). This latter pattern is characteristic of leisure research findings (see Kelly, Steinkamp, & Kelly 1987).

I see several reasons why time-budget estimates of categories of activity normally thought to be positively engaging might not be associ-ated with other measures of psychological well-being.

1. The categories are too broad. Knitting may constitute a major proportion of a person's hobby category yet not be nearly so uplifting as aperson's rare opportunities to engage in an exhilarating hobby such asskydiving.

2. A combination of categories that are too broad and variations in meaning that are idiosyncratic to individuals may have an effect similar to that of overwhelming true-score variance associated with a single highly meaningful member of a category. A single activity within a category may be highly valued, but the presence of many neutral or even disliked activities in the same larger category will only contribute to error in the measure. Household duties, for example, may be mostly onerous or neu-tral for most people most of the time, but for some people, specific house-hold tasks may be the source of special satisfaction.

3. A great proportion of everyday behavior is prescribed. There may be too little discretionary time most days (together with low probability of capturing in a time-budget record rare but positively meaningful behavior in a day's or even a week's time budgets) to allow a correlation with


durations of activities to emerge. Put differently, most time use may be functional rather than affective in impact. How can we recognize the exceptional activities?

4. The relationship between time use and psychological well-beingmay be radically nonlinear and therefore difficult to capture. The non-linearity may be of several types. A threshold effect may exist, such that only at exceedingly low, deprivation-level time allocations does psycho-logical state become affected. Conversely, it may take a huge dose of positively valued activity to raise one’s characteristic level of psychologi-cal well-being.

Psychological well-being may in fact be relatively independent of what one does. Genetically determined temperament or relatively fixed aspects of the person such as self-esteem may be overwhelming determi-nants of psychological well-being. The amount of variability associated with contextual determinants may be too small to depict with relatively gross measuring instruments. These fixed factors may influence how one performs an activity and how one feels about it more than does the content of the activities one performs.

Daily time use and psychological well-being are incommensurate; that is, what one does on a given day represents a tiny sample of all that one does over the span of time that brackets anything as time-extended as a personality trait. Psychological well-being is such a characteristic that is relatively stable over fairly expended periods of time. There is thus a need to equalize the time references of indicators of time use and subjective emotional status. This reason I find most plausible, and I therefore will elaborate on it at this point.

Psychological concepts of personality have benefited from using the distinction between trait and state (Cattell & Scheier, 1961; Spielberger, Gorsuch, & Luschene, 1970). A personality trait is a tendency toward action, emotion, or thought that is long-standing, resistant to change, and relatively predictable for an individual across many situations. A state, on the other hand, represents a tendency toward action, emotion, or thought that is contemporaneous and likely to vary over time and with context. Of course, aggregated repetition of states across different times and contexts begins to define a trait.

State Affect and Activities

5.

6.

Research of the past decade has generally viewed such personal attributes as neuroticism, life satisfaction, and psychological well-being as traits. In contrast, subjective affect states, particularly the relatively inde-


pendent positive affect and negative affect, are relatively short-term (Wat-son, 1988). Obviously, traits and states are not independent. Not sur-prisingly, positive affect is more frequent among people of extraverted temperament (a trait) and negative affect states are more common in people of neurotic temperament (a trait) (Costa & McCrae, 1980). It has also become evident that people judge their own psychological well-being not only by the infrequency of their negative states but also by the frequency of their positive states, and the two valences are very imperfectly correlatedwith one another (Diener & Iran-Nejad, 1986; Watson, Clark, & Tellegen, 1988; Watson & Tellegen, 1985). It is also evident that people strive hard for positive states and the absence of negative states. A major stream of research has demonstrated that positive and negative affect states are highly responsive to daily events of different valence (Clark & Watson, 1988; Lawton, DeVoe, & Parmelee, 1995; Stone, 1981).

An "event" appears to be the external cognate of a state; that is, anevent is contemporaneous, time-limited, and incompletely predictable by either environmental or personality characteristics. Events as opera-tionalized in events research comprise a mixture of objective (externally verifiable) and subjective (important enough to the individual to be re-ported) components. Events are therefore selective, in contrast to the time budget, which is comprehensive.

The correlations between event valence and affect states (positive vs. negative) referenced earlier are substantial (see also Stone, 1981; Zautra, Affleck, & Tennen, 1994). However, events account for only a small propor-tion of everyday life. There is a need to study the totality of everyday life in relation to its subjective cognates. Can we find a way to use the time budget in a way similar to that of the study of events in relation tosubjective states?

The importance given to "meaning" in leisure research (Iso-Ahola,1990; Lawton, 1993; Tinsley, Teaff, Colbs, & Kaufman, 1985) leads to the idea that there should be some way by which the affective valence of everyactivity could be characterized. In this way, microelements of everyday behavior would be matched appropriately with the microelements of subjective experience. In research that Moss and I reported on several groups of elders, we attempted to provide this match in several ways that did not work at all. We piloted yesterday interviews that requested ratings for each reported activity on scales of pleasure, satisfaction, meaningful-ness, and importance. Various problems with each of these frames of reference led us finally to ask simply, "How much did you like ... (theactivity mentioned)?"

When activities were analyzed by liking scores, expected group differ-ences emerged: Independently living groups expressed significantly greater liking scores than the two service-receiving groups for six of the 13 activity


categories and several environmental and social contexts. Higher liking scores were found in an in-home services group than an institutional waiting-list group. Later analyses revealed a particularly informative find-ing. Older people reported greater liking ratings for certain activities in proportion to the amount of time they spent in their activities: interaction with friends, reading, television, recreation, as well as the contexts that included household family and time outside the dwelling unit (Lawton et al., 1986–1987). In this same analysis, more time spent in rest and relaxation was associated with lower liking scores for this activity. The next phase of analysis showed that more liking for each of the activities, with few exceptions, was associated with higher personal adjustment. In terms of the model shown in Figure 5.1, more time spent in particular activities was rarely associated directly with personal adjustment. However, people spend more time on activities they like, and because such liking is in turn related to personal adjustment, we can conclude that there is an indirect relationship between time allocated and well-being that is mediated by how much one likes the activity.

To some extent, this introduction of the subjective construct of "lik-ing" for an activity provides a commensurate construct for the microunitof a behavior category from the time budget. Roger Barker (1968) called such small units of behavior " tesserae" and we can think of the affectivestate that accompanies a behavioral tessera as an affect tessera. The real payoff in being able to relate behavioral and affective tesserae to one another has come from research on the experience sampling method (ESM; Csikszentmihalyi & Larson, 1987). This approach has the great advantage of stopping both behavior and affect state at the moment they are occur-ring, without introducing the memory-related and retrospective biases of the yesterday interview. The self-generated diary would also be less sub-ject to such distortions, except that activity entries are typically made after a lag, a time during which recall of the affective state is subject to decay. As used by a number of investigators, including Zuzanek and Smale (Chapter 6, this volume) and Larson et al. (1985), the ESM has successfully inquired about a number of states that might accompany an activity: positive and negative affects, activation, enjoyment, challenge, intrinsic motivation, perceived control, and other cognitive, affective, and motivational states. These states have been shown to vary substantially with the behaviors, locations, and social contexts of daily life (Csikszentmihalyi & Larson,

1987; Larson et al., 1985). Alas, the ESM has also been found difficult to manage by some subject

groups. For example, Voelkl and Brown (1989) originally sought 30 nursing home residents for an ESM study, but ended with only 4 who could completely successfully comply.

It thus seems desirable to work further to adapt time-budget tech-


niques to accommodate the inclusion of subjective states and to link them with the accompanying activity. The ESM researchers have demonstrated that many subjects are capable of rating states at the moment of the beep of the signaling device. It would be very useful to test the limits of subjects'ability to track states by including the full set of state ratings as used in ESM for use with people in connection with a self-generated time diary. Isthere a threshold of frailty or educational deprivation beyond which ESM response becomes impossible? One way to reduce subjects' burden wouldbe to ask them to fill out the state rating scale only for an especially enjoyable activity and an especially aversive activity.

A multi-item state rating scale is much more difficult to accommodatewithin a yesterday format. One possible advance might be to find a better,single qualitative term than degree of liking to characterize each activity. A possible means to elicit affective ratings of extremely liked and extremely disliked activities might be to prepare a subject for a yesterday interview by requesting that these most- and least-liked activity ratings be done during the 24-hour reference period, written down by the subject, and reported later to the interviewer as part of the yesterday interview. Finally, a face-to-face interviewer might have each activity written on a card as it is elicited; at the end of the interview, the subject would then be asked to sort into piles representing affectively neutral activities, negative, and positive activities. The presumably shorter list of activities with positive or nega-tive valences then might be rated with a short, state-description set ofadjectives.

CONCLUSIONS

It does seem that a satisfactory technique to accomplish the majorpurposes of a quality-of-life-oriented time budget may be difficult to achieve. These purposes are, first, to account for all activity in a day. Second, the state measure should be meaningful and usable by the major-ity of subjects. Third, the activity tesserae and state tesserae should be linked. If the time budget cannot produce such data, event studies, the ESM, and time- or occasion-sampled behavior observation techniques need to be developed to provide better yields and therefore less bias in samples than present methods do.

The ideal result of improved methods, whether for time budget or other approaches, would be data that help bridge the gap between the quality of tesserae and overall quality of life or even psychological well-being. Although the psychological literature on affect has securely estab-lished positive affect and the absence of negative affect as essential and


partly independent facets of mental health, we know very little of the internal calculus that people use to aggregate affect quality across time in such a way as to yield a net value on the perceived overall quality-of-life(QOL) continuum. There are probably very wide individual differences in how people perform their subjective QOL mathematics. For some, it is an absence of major negative affect; for others, it is an excess of mildly positive affect; for still others, a few positive peaks may constitute a personal judgment of good quality of life. Studying the temporal course of both activities and affect is the only route to such understanding. Account-ing for all time would seem to be a necessary property of a successful effort to comprehend the personal process of assessing quality of life. Therefore, despite the problems involved in adapting the time budget to address subjective quality of life, the effort would seem worthwhile. Although it is important to recognize and deal with knotty methodological issues of the type discussed in this chapter, it is important to recognize that knowledgehas emerged despite such problems. Research on older people's use oftime has contributed greatly to our understanding of the lifestyle of elders in widely varying residential situations and states of health.

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