Spouses’ Shared Time in a Cross-National Context: A Comparison of the U.S., Spain and France

Joan Garcia Roman, University of Minnesota
Sarah Flood, University of Minnesota
Katie Genadek, University of Minnesota

This paper investigates spouse’s shared time across countries to understand how social conditions and policy are related to married couple’s time allocation. To do this, we use time use surveys from three countries with varying social conditions and welfare regimes. We use information about who is present during activities to analyze total time with spouse, time with spouse only and time with spouse and children. To our knowledge, this is the first study analyzing couples’ time spent together in a cross national context. Our preliminary results comparing USA and Spain show American couples spending less time with a spouse than Spanish couples.