What Do Russians Spend Their Time Budgets On?
To study the changes occurring in people's daily lives, researchers often rely on time distribution data. In international practice, these data are also widely used as part of comprehensive assessments of the quality of life and well-being.
The authors of the study (Natalia Voronina, Maria Nagernyak, Natalia Mikhailova, Sergey Ter-Akopov) revealed that the population spends most of their time on paid work, sleep, household and family affairs. Despite the widespread myth, watching TV is still a popular leisure activity among Russians, which takes an average of 2 hours a day on weekdays and 3 hours on weekends.
As in many countries of the world, in Russia there are differences between how men and women spend their time. At the same time, the maximum gender gap is observed in the field of domestic work and child care: women in Russia spend 2 times more time on this than men. This corresponds to the average for OECD countries.
Improving the work-life balance is becoming one of the priorities of social policy development. In this area, Russia is characterized by the fact that about 60% of employees to some extent note the blurring of the boundaries between working and non-working hours. At the same time, the majority of working Russians (77%) are ready to work more to get a higher salary, and are not ready (73%) to earn less to have more free time.
The method of studying time budgets has a great research potential and is important from the point of view of obtaining scientifically based knowledge about the daily life of people both within the country and at the level of international comparisons.
Human Capital Multidisciplinary Research Center Digest Project is managed by Olga Voron.
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