Time-use, personality psychology, and social suffering

The scarcity of “time” is a pressing issue for most people in the late-modern industrialized societies. A most salient feature of this issue is how one should use the time at one’s disposal – often backgrounded in lamentation of the reality of most time already being tied up with (often work-related) responsibilities.
Much social pathology is related to or manifests itself as time-use problems. And in addition, the understanding of such problems is often confined to the private sphere of the individual’s life – often without considering the societal structures within which the individual lives her life.
In this paper, I will discuss how studies of persons’ time-use and their experience of everyday life can illuminate contemporary social problems.
The study of what people “actually do” in their everyday lives mirrors the theoretical debate in current Personality Psychology about the importance of “behavior” for understanding personality – and problems in the latter debate can thus shed light on how to understand the former.
I will draw on empirical material from my PhD-project, where I’ve carried out a survey study, combining time-use and diary methods. The empirical material contains information about not only everyday activities, but also how they were experienced and how they mattered to the participant.
I’ll argue that studying persons as not just “individuals”, but as participants in structures of social practice, provides important clues to the understanding of social pathologies: That studying the individual’s personal way of conducting his/her life under the structural conditions of contemporary society enables us to understand how the plurality of modern life is manifested in individual existences.