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What Makes an Activity Most Enjoyable? Alternative Ways of Measuring Subjective Aspects of Time-Use

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Abstract

Time-use analyses typically report the duration and frequency of pursuing specific types of activity. But how people evaluate what they report doing is not necessarily evident without additional, complementary forms of data. There are many alternative approaches to the measurement of subjective aspects of daily time-use, ranging from short term and activity-specific to long term and general. How is the extent of enjoyment operationalized, and what aspects of activity are then shown as germane? A special analytic focus in this paper is on a question pursued in the past by Statistics Canada—on the most enjoyable activity reported on a respondent’s time diary. Data show that the activity most frequently chosen as most enjoyable is not the same as activities less frequently pursued but of greater salience for enjoyability if done. Watching television is a nearly ubiquitous activity, hence gathering a high frequency of “votes” as most enjoyable activity. In contrast, a significantly higher percentage of those pursuing activities with active social participation or a live venue choose these as the affective highlights of their day. This paper explores what these constructs make possible with time-use data for understanding what makes an activity most enjoyable.

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Notes

  1. The experience sampling approach (Csikszentmihalyi 1997) asks respondents for intensive subjective information about specific activities immediately ongoing. This enables copious information about the enjoyability of individual activities but provides only a limited view of the content and experiences of the whole day.

  2. As might be expected from preceding data presented, the strength of relationship in this context of the more conventional relative frequency measure of most enjoyed activity is much less distinct. The associations of Robinson’s enjoyment ratings of all activities performed with the relative frequency and the intrinsic enjoyability measures, respectively, validates the latter but not the former as a shorthand measure of activity enjoyment.

  3. The mean number of episodes provided by respondents in Statistics Canada’s 2005 General Social Survey is about 17, with 25 not uncommon.

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  1. Department of Sociology, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada

    William Michelson

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  1. William Michelson
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Correspondence to William Michelson.

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Michelson, W. What Makes an Activity Most Enjoyable? Alternative Ways of Measuring Subjective Aspects of Time-Use. Soc Indic Res 103, 77–91 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-010-9697-1

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