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Time pressure and cross-national inequality

Liana C. Sayer, Ohio State University
Judith Treas, University of California, Irvine

Levels of time pressure are high in industrialized countries, with the majority of adults reporting they sometimes or always feel very rushed. Two explanations for widespread feelings of time pressure have been advanced: the objective approahc which argues that time pressures stem from economic and demographic changes that have increased obligatory time demands; and the cultural explanation which posits that time pressure stems from societal discourses that value action-packed lives and rampant consumerism. We use cross-national time diary data to assess whether individual perceptions of time pressure are positively associated with societal inequality, net of objective time allocation, in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States. We find that perceptions of time pressure are lowest in Australia and highest in Canada. Multivariate results suggest that objective time constraints may be more salient in shaping perceptions of time pressure in Australia compared with Canada, the UK, and the US.

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Presented in Session 28: Time use data and analysis