The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the division of household labour could continue to lock down or start to break gender roles. Using time-use data of n = 473 individuals collected during the lockdown restrictions in Belgium from March to May 2020, we analyse the gendered division of routine and non-routine household labour in absolute time use and relative shares. We compare against the Belgian time-use data of 2013 for the same time period ( n = 678 individuals). A time-demanding work and living situation associate with an increase in men’s time spent on household labour during the lockdown but not with a change in women’s time use. The gender gap closes in absolute time but not in relative shares of routine and non-routine household labour. The limited impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the gender division of household labour indicates a temporal rather than a substantial change in gender roles.
Background
Supervisor support is crucial for the successful and timely completion of the PhD and the largest contributor to PhD students’ overall job satisfaction. The COVID-19 pandemic affected PhD students’ life substantially through delayed experiments, missed timelines, running out of funding, change to online team- and supervisor meetings, mandatory working from home, and social confinement.
Aim
This contribution considers PhD students’ satisfaction scores to reflect the extent to which PhD students felt supported by their supervisor during the COVID-19 pandemic so far and aims to investigate to what extent did PhD students’ satisfaction with supervisor support changed over time.
Method
It uses two longitudinal two cohorts of wave 4 to 5 of the PhD Survey at a Belgian university. These cohorts are representative of two different ways the COVID-19 pandemic might have impacted doctoral research. Cohort 1 (n = 345) includes a pre-COVID measurement (April-May 2019) and a measurement immediately after the start of the abrupt lockdown in April-May 2020. Cohort 2 (n = 349) includes the measurement at the onset of the pandemic in 2020 and after a year with continuously changing containment policies (April-May 2021). The composite measure of satisfaction with supervisor support is based on six items with high internal consistency.
Results
No significant net effect of time was revealed. Instead within subject interactions with time showed that in cohort 1, PhD students at the start of their PhD trajectory and PhD students with family responsibilities reported lower supervisor satisfaction scores over time. In cohort 2, PhD students not pursuing academic careers reported lower satisfaction scores over time.
Conclusion
In times of crises, special attention needs to be paid to PhD students who are extra susceptible to uncertainties because of their junior status or personal situation, and especially those PhD students for whom doctoral research is not a trajectory to position themselves in academia.
Previous research has shown that a prolonged recall period is associated with lower data quality in time-diary research. In these studies, the recall period is roughly estimated on the basis of the period between the assigned diary day and the agreed collection day. Because this is so rudimentary, little is known about the duration of the mean recall period and its consequences for data quality. Recent advances in online methodology now allow a better investigation of the recall period using time stamps. Using a refined indicator, the authors examine the duration of the recall period, to what extent this duration is related to socioeconomic characteristics, and how a prolonged recall period affects data quality. The authors demonstrate that using online time-diary data collected from 8,535 teachers in Belgium, the mean recall period is less than 24 hr for most respondents, although respondents with many time constraints have extended recall periods. Additionally, a prolonged recall period indeed has negative consequences for data quality. Quality deterioration already arises several hours after an activity has been completed, much sooner than previous research has indicated.
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