Americans spend more time eating and tending to their appearance than Soviets, but Soviets sleep more than Amerians. Americans spend more time cleaning their homes; Soviets do more cooking and laundry. Americans watch more television; Soviets spend more time on child care.
These are some of the glimpses into daily life contained in a new study of the ways people use time in the two countries. The study was a joint venture of the Survey Research Center of the University of Maryland and the Institute for Sociological Research of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.
Discussions began in 1975 but the work was not completed until recently.
”It ought to be subtitled `From Detente to Glasnost,` ” noted John P. Robinson, director of the Survey Research Center and a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, in a telephone interview from Berkeley, Calif.
Work in the Soviet Union was under the direction of Vladimir G. Andreyenkov and Vasily D. Patrushev.
QUESTIONS AND DIARIES
Interviews were conducted from January through April of 1986 with 710 residents of Jackson, Mich., and 2,181 residents of Pskov, a city midway between Leningrad and Riga. In addition, participants answered more than 600 written questions and kept diaries for 24 hours.
The cities were selected because similar work had been conducted there in 1965. The study group in Jackson was considerably smaller than the one in Pskov because financing made available through grants in the United States was considerably less than that provided by the Soviet Academy of Sciences.
Jackson is a city of 80,000 whose economic base is mainly in the automotive industry. Also heavily industrial, Pskov is an ancient Russian city that was badly damaged in World War I. The population, which had numbered 62,000, was 143 at war`s end. Today it is 197,000.
According to the study, the residents of Jackson and Pskov devoted the same amount of time-about 19 hours a week each, on average-to housework and family care despite the fact that the Americans owned more time-saving household appliances. In both cities, women did about 70 percent of the housework, and men about 30 percent.
When the women of the two cities were compared, the differences between them were found to be more marked than those between the men, a fact attributed by the researchers to differences in the employment patterns of women. In Jackson, 55 percent of the women were in the labor force, compared with 81 percent of the women in Pskov. The gap among the men was narrower: 91 percent of those in Pskov and 85 percent of those in Jackson held jobs.
MORE TIME FOR FAMILY
Although more of the Soviet women worked outside the home, they devoted more time to family obligations, including the preparation of meals (8 hours a week in Pskov; 6 in Jackson), and laundry (4 hours in Pskov; 2 in Jackson). By contrast, women in Jackson spent more time in housecleaning (7 hours a week compared to 4 1/2 in Pskov).
The Pskov women also spent more time in child care-defined for the study as tasks directly involving children, such as reading or taking them to lessons. In Pskov, it was 4 hours a week; in Jackson, 3. However, the calcuations used to arrive at those figures also included women with no children at home.
SOME BIG SIMILARITIES
In both cities, men pitched in at home-or failed to-to the same degree.
”There is a stereotype that American couples share household tasks more equally than do Soviet couples,” Robinson said. ”But our numbers showed that in the Soviet Union women do about 69 percent of the housework and men 31 percent. In the United States, women do 67 percent and men do 33 percent.
”The total mount of time spent on household-related work was almost identical. In both countries it was about 25 hours a week for women and 11 hours for men.”
The Jackson respondents had more leisure time than their Pskov counterparts. Again, differences were more marked for women than for men. The Jackson women had 11 hours more leisure than the Pskov women, the Jackson men 4 hours more than Pskov men.
There were activities to which Pskov residents devoted more time than Jackson residents. Among them were reading (Pskov, 42 minutes a day; Jackson, 27) and walking (Pskov, 16 minutes a day; Jackson, 4).
In addition, the Americans spent more time eating (61 minutes a day, compared with 48 for the Soviets) and in washing, dressing and caring for personal appearance (71 minutes to 55). But they spent less time sleeping: 7 hours 54 minutes a day, compared with 8 hours and 17 minutes.
”The results indicate a rather important difference in the locus of social life in the two communities,” Robinson said. ”Soviet citizens appear to have more social contact at the workplace, including eating meals. By the time the workday is done, there is less need or opportunity for socializing outside the immediate family.” –
