The Wellness Project seeks to fill a gap in the current knowledge about how the structure and duration of Americans' daily activities impact their emotional health and wellness. In this project, we specifically focus on the ways in which the allocation of time to different activities during the day translates into psychological well-being. We focus on mood and other self-reported aspects of psychological wellness, such as loneliness and depression, as well as satisfaction with work, family relationships, friendships and life in general.
We use the data from Time Study collected annually by the SIQSS.The longitudinal character of the data enables us to examine over-time relationships between time use and emotional well-being, as well as the dynamic changes in time use patterns over the past few years. We address the following questions:
- Does the Internet use within and outside of the workplace affect emotional well-being? Is emotional well-being affected by where, when, and how the Internet is used? If so, how?
- What specific roles do social activities play in mental wellness? What are the differences in the roles of social activities within the workplace and outside of the workplace?
- How do the patterns of time use within the workplace impact mental wellness? What role does the duration and types of activities play?
- How does time use outside of the work place impact emotional wellness? Which forms of leisure activities foster mental well-being?
The first article resulting from this research, which explores the effects of various Internet activities, such as email and web browsing, on mental well-being, has been submitted for publication. In this article, results of cross-sectional multivariate regression models suggest that time spent on certain online activities, such as chatting and web browsing, is positively related to loneliness and depressed mood and negatively related to satisfaction. Some of these relationships persist even after including fixed effects that account for observed and unobserved time-invariant, individual-level characteristics. Overall, results from this first stage of research suggest that loneliness and satisfaction tend to vary with time devoted to online activities except email and that individual-level heterogeneity cannot explain these relationships.
