Does Delaying School Start Time Change the Time-Use of Korean Adolescents? A Difference-in-Difference Analysis Using Time-Use Data

• In Event: Chinese roundtable II (Sponsored by SIG: East Asia)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Educational policies and programs

Proposal

Objectives:
Korea is one of the countries where students spend an extended period of time at schools. According to the national report published by Statistics Korea in 2014, Korean high school students generally spent over 8 hours a day at school, which means they consumed about one-third of the day at school. As a trade-off, a large portion of their time at school make the time allocated to doing other activities is relatively small. In relation to sleeping hours, for example, Korean adolescents sleep significantly fewer hours than the recommended sleeping hours of 8-10 hours by the National Sleep Foundation. As education policymakers worldwide become more aware of adolescents’ well-being, many countries are attempting to introduce various policy interventions that guarantee more hours for leisure and sleep for their students. In line with the emerging awareness, in Gyeonggi province, Korea, there was an attempt to adjust school hours by delaying school start time. The rationale behind this intervention was that fewer school hours could lead to more time for sleep as well as extracurricular activities, and in turn enhance student well-being. However, since its introduction in Gyeonggi province in 2014, little has been known of how much delaying school start time actually changed the time-use of Korean adolescents, such as sleeping hours. Therefore, this study focuses on providing empirical evidence on the impact of delaying school start time on the change of sleeping hours among Korean adolescents using national time-use data. In addition, changes in the hours of leisure activities and the number of breakfasts student had a month were also examined to address the impact of this intervention on adolescents’ well-being.

Theoretical Framework:
Preexisting studies pointed out that long period of time at school especially due to early school start time is negatively associated with adolescents’ well-being especially due to the lack of sleep (e.g., Borlase, Gander & Gibson, 2013). Despite empirical findings demonstrating benefits of delaying school start time in regard to sleeping hours in North America and in Europe, Korean policymakers have been reluctant to introduce this policy as early school start time has been considered an essential component to securing teaching and learning hours at school. Nevertheless, Gyeonggi province determined to delay school start time an hour from eight to nine o’clock in September 2014. Several studies reported benefits of delaying school start time on well-being among students in Gyeonggi province. However, most of the studies demonstrated serious flaws in the quality of the data they have used, raising questions about the reliability and validity of their findings. For instance, since some studies used data that only sampled students from the Gyeonggi province, they failed to compare the change of well-being among the sampled students to students in other regions in Korea. Therefore, it is necessary to conduct an analysis using nationally representative data of time-use among students in order to examine the genuine effect of delaying school start time by looking at the differences in patterns of lifestyle between students from Gyeonggi province and those from other regions since the beginning of the intervention.

Data and Method:
Using Time-Use Survey 2014 administered by Statistics Korea, this study examines whether the policy of delaying school start time in Gyeonggi province significantly changed the time -use pattern among adolescents including a change in sleeping hours. Time-Use Survey 2014 targeted people over the age of 10 at the time of the survey and collected information from participants three times a year: in July, September and November of 2014. For the survey, participants were asked to record their time-use each day; in each 10-minute slot, they wrote down what they usually did during weekdays and weekends, respectively.
This study focuses on adolescents who enrolled in primary, middle and high schools when the survey was administered. The main dependent variables are the time-use patterns regarding the well-being status including sleeping hours, and whether they had breakfast during weekdays. In addition, we include information on the perceived lack of time, feeling of fatigue and life satisfaction.
We analyze the policy impact of delaying school start time in Gyeonggi province employing the difference-in-difference (DID) analysis. In the data set of July 2014, regardless of where they are located, schools started at the same time. Yet, in the latter two data sets of September and November 2014, schools in Gyeonggi province started an hour later than their counterparts in other regions due to the new policy intervention in Gyeonggi province since September 2014. Therefore, the DID approach is believed to be an appropriate approach to examine the impact of the policy. Furthermore, we controlled for various family backgrounds such as parent employment status, family structure, and family SES in the final model of analysis in order to predict the pure effect of the policy of delaying school start time on time use of adolescents.

Anticipated Results:
On the basis of the results of earlier studies, we expect to see statistically significant differences in the dependent variables, especially sleeping hours, between students in Gyeonggi province and their counterparts in other regions. By contrast, however, the policy might have a modest impact on the changes occurred in the daily time use among Korean adolescents than it did in the Western context. Unlike the many Western countries where most previous studies were conducted, the students in Korea bear immense pressure to enter prestigious universities as in many other East Asian countries. Thus, Korean students would tend to maintain or even increase the amount of time they spend studying. These two hypotheses confronting against each other require us to examine the effect of the policy of changing school start time in Gyeonggi province, Korea, with a rigorous analytical strategy.

Scholarly Significance:
This study is significant for school policymakers in East Asian countries where high pressure for studying for college entrance exist. Although the length of time students stay at school is an important issue for their physical and mental wellness as well as cognitive development, little has been known about the effect of delaying school start time as a policy intervention to control school hours in East Asian countries. We expect to provide a meaningful policy implication of the delaying school start time policy for not only Korea but also other East Asian countries where there is an ongoing debate on whether adjustment of school time would be an effective way to improve the well-being of adolescent amid the excessive nationwide enthusiasm for education.

Authors

• Jaehwee Shim, Korea University

• Haram Jeon, Korea University

• Kyung Keun Kim, Korea University