Over the years, do you think you have been spending more and more time at home? If so, your experiences are like those of many adults in the United States.
Over time, from 2003 through 2019, adults in the United States were spending a bit more time at home, the American Time Use Survey showed. Then, in 2020, the amount of time Americans spent at home increased markedly. That’s not surprising; that was the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. What is much more notable is that since then, the time spent at home has decreased only a little. Overall, on a typical day, Americans have been at home for 1 hour and 39 minutes more in 2022 than in 2003.
Every year, a representative sample of adults in the United States aged 15 years and older keep a time diary for 24 hours of all their activities, where those activities took place, and who else (if anyone) was with them. Patrick Sharkey of the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs analyzed 19 years of those Time Use Survey data and described his findings in “Homebound: The Long-Term Rise in Time Spent at Home Among U.S. Adults,” published this year (2024) in Sociological Science.
Sharkey looked at people of different ages, genders, races and ethnicities, income levels, educational levels, and employment statuses. He found that people in every one of those groups spent more time at home in 2022 than they had in 2003. (Participants were asked about their marital status, but none of the results were reported separately for people of different statuses.)
For some groups,........