Introduction

Asking how young people's use of time in the UK has changed over recent decades is an important, but deceptively simple, question. How we use our time is both a measurement of direct change, and is also an index of more subtle, underlying shifts in social values and preoccupations, so it is crucial to our task of looking at social change. Understanding what young people are doing and who they are doing it with is an important anchor for understanding the social patterning of interactions that are part of the transition to adulthood for young people.

The way that children and young people use their time involves both elements that are structurally arranged by the legal and statutory frameworks within which they order their days (compulsory attendance at education, for example), and elements of ‘free’ (and therefore more clearly ‘chosen’) time. Patterns of time use thus reflect both how we as a society shape our time, and how we decide to spend some of it ourselves. As Professor Robert Sampson challenged us early on in our work, understanding time use helps us see how we as a society have chosen (implicitly or explicitly) to structure the transition from adolescence to adulthood.

How we spend our time is such a crucial question that it formed a central part of the work of the Changing Adolescence Programme. We funded a team led by Professor Leon Feinstein who was then at the Institute of Education, working with Karen Robson and Annik Sorhaindo in London, and Dr Stephen Peck and Professor Jacqueline Eccles at the University of Michigan, USA. This chapter draws on the work that they did in setting out the key constructs and identifying previous work on the topic. As a result of the findings of the review, the Foundation also supported an exercise in mining the existing UK Time Use Surveys for useful data that would fill in some of the gaps, and help pose more sharply certain questions. This chapter synthesises the main messages from both the review, and from the additional analyses, as well as drawing on a wider reading of the relevant literature. Fuller versions of the work on which it draws are available from Dr Stephen Peck (for the review), or from the Foundation (for the data analysis).