Stay Connected and Regulated? Social Sequences of Everyday Activities and Health During the Global Pandemic

• In Event: 41017 - COVID-19 and Inequalities in Health and Wellbeing

Abstract

Everyday life can be unpredictable and disorganized, especially with the dramatic social changes brought about by the global COVID-19 pandemic. While studies investigated the normalization of the amount of time for common patterns of daily activity, few examine the impact of the temporal sequencing of activity patterns on individuals’ health and well-being. This study used detailed time diary data from the 2021 and 2022 American Time Use Surveys to examine how weekday schedules influence three different aspects of individual health and well-being during the pandemic. Three paid work clusters and three unpaid work clusters were identified using social sequence analysis. Regression analyses suggest that individuals tend to report poorer general health, cognitive difficulties, and lower life satisfaction if they follow more unstructured and less regulated activity patterns. These detrimental effects of irregularity are exacerbated with increased solitude but do not appear within the regularized activity cluster (e.g., 8-5 shift). The paper closes by discussing how maintaining regularity in daily routines fosters embeddedness and integration into broader societal temporal structures, which may have an independent protective effect from social connectedness on individuals’ health during challenging periods like the pandemic.

Author

• Tianyao Qu, Indiana University-Bloomington