Some Perspectives on the Study on Time Use

Over the last several decades, social scientists have begun to pay much more attention to the amounts and patterns of time use among households. What is probably the most important objective is to supplement our measures of overall well-being by adding to the conventional GNP measures of market produced goods and services the well-being associated with household produced goods and services, as well as the well-being asso ciated with the intrinsic satisfactions associated with all of the activities that the household is involved in. It is widely agreed by economists that the standard measure of well-being (the value of market work plus the value of leisure) is seriously deficient, but there is much less agreement about the best way to measure intrinsic satisfactions. Although there are some conceptual problems with the valuation of market goods and services, the main measurement issues have to do with the valuation of the intrinsic satisfactions from both market and non-market activities. Some studies have called these satisfactions "process benefits" and measured them by the set of survey questions shown below: