Time-Budgets of Human Behavior
-
-
p 0001
-
Several book reviews bound together in a red book entitled Sorokin Reviews, This book analyzes the ways in which a group of human beings spend their time.Material for the analysis was obtained from systematic day-to-day records kept during five months of 1935 by a group of white-collar unemployed and WPA relief workers in Boston and its vicinity. The composition of the group studied was predominantly female, white, single, averaging between twenty and thirty years of age, and long resident in Boston or its environs. The majority had had high school education. All were unfavorably situated economically, and few of the group had worked previously, those mostly as clerks.Each individual in the group was asked to fill out schedules recording all daily activities which consumed at least five minutes. The schedules themselves were designed to minimize suggestibility, and after the authors had discarded records that were incomplete or would destroy the homogeneity of the group to be studied, there remained as the basis for this study between four and five thousand records collected from approximately one hundred individuals.Time-Budgets of Human Behavior is divided into five parts. Part I outlines the purpose and scope of the study, and gives a brief survey of previous studies of time-budgets. Part II explains the classification of activities under five main headings, ranging from activities satisfying physiological and economic needs (which together consume about eighteen hours of the day) to love and pleasurable activities. The average time per member of total group spent under this last heading was 90.6 minutes, and the authors suggest that "writers on leisure have greatly exaggerated the amount of time available for that
-
-
p 0002
-
Several book reviews bound together in a red book entitled Sorokin Reviews, purpose by contemporary laboring classes and have baselessly worried themselves over the problem of filling long leisure hours with healthful and commendable activities."One of the least time-consuming divisions in the whole study was found to be "Political and Civic Activities," with an expenditure of only one-tenth of a minute a day per person. The comment on this unexpected finding is that "If the people, in so far as they are represented by our group (and it probably does represent a considerable slice of the urban semi-proletariat), spend only one-tenth of one minute per day for all political and civic activities, such a preoccupation can hardly be said to play an important r&le in theirbehavior.....Such a situation is likely to mean a decided decline of the role and value of these activities in the conduct and mentality of the group. It amounts to political indifferentism.....Such a group furnishes a favorable basis for the emergence and growth of various political minorities with dictatorial tendencies."Part III is a discussion of motives for overt activities. Material for this section was obtained by requesting 103 members of the group to indicate, during a period of two weeks, their motives for each action. Psychiatrists may question the relative value of such a source, but it is undoubtedly a step forward from the usual purely observational and factual approach to sociological problems. The authors themselves feel that "the empirical material presented here is of unquestionable value for studying autobiographical motivation. It gives the inner picture of activity as seen by the performers, and in addition has broader implications."interpretations in this section make it the most interesting in the whole book, despite inclusion of the following statement which, while it may have some justification from a strictly statistical point of view, will not be wholly acceptable to many psychologists: "The data above [on motivation] definitely contradict all theories of human motivation which are based exclusively upon the hedonistic quest for pleasure and avoidance of painand suffering. These hedonistic and utilitarian motives are certainly present and, as we have seen, occupy quite a large place among the motives given by our sample. But besides these there are other motives which are predominantly non-hedonistic from the standpoint of the person experiencing and recording them. Such are the social and religious-moral-juridical motives, custom, force of circumstances, 'To fill time,' even curiosity. These motives prima facie have either nothing to do with or a very remote relationship to any seeking of pleasure and avoiding of pain or suffering on the part of the person dominated by these motives and performing the actions they had to. If the partisans of the hedonistic uni-versalism attempt to extend the meaning of their motives over these classes, then their concept becomes so wide and vague that it loses any meaning."Part IV is an analysis of social actions of the group, both individually and with groups of various numbers.Part V deals with the predictability of human activities and of social processes. For this phase of the study 106 individuals in the group were asked to predict what their own behavior would be twenty-four hours in advance, forty-eight hours, a week, a month, the next Sunday, and a month from the next Sunday. These predictions were then compared with the actual behavior records for the corresponding day, and it was found that the average error per individual per day was fully one-fifth of the day.The authors have tentatively deduced from this material that prediction of the more "universal" activities such as those satisfying physical and economic needs, is likely to be more accurate than prediction of the variable and less "universal" societal and pleasurable activities. Another tentative deduction is that the more stable and routine the individual's social environment, the higher the accuracy of prediction.are followed by a discussion of the predictability of social processes and events. In this section contemporary social planners and forecasters are dealt with none
-
-
p 0003
-
Several book reviews bound together in a red book entitled Sorokin Reviews, too gently, and the authors sum up their views on social planning by saying that "since socio-cultural life changes incessantly, some foreknowledge and planning is unavoidable as an adaptive reaction to these changing conditions. In this sense foreknowledge and planning existed in the past, go on at the present, and will avoidable necessity it does not follow that any such planning will be successful, or that with the passage of time the percentage of successful forecasts and planning (i.e., those in which the expected and the actual results coincide) will increase, or that they have become so much more 'scientific' that we have a right to boast of our ability to forecast and control socio-cultural phenomena. At present, all such schemes remain as much guess-work and gambling as they were in the past. As guesses, given as such, they are not objectionable. But when a guess is presented as a tested scientific prediction, the result is a falsification injurious to those who advance it, to those who believe it, and to science itself."
