What and How are we Measuring When we Research Gendered Divisions of Domestic Labor? Remaking the Household Portrait Method into a Care/Work Portrait

Abstract

The porous and shifting boundaries within and between care and work concepts, and practices and their related measurement complexities call for innovative conceptual and methodological approaches to research on work and care. This article details how we reconfigured the Household Portrait – a qualitative, participatory, visual, creative method that engages couples in mapping and discussing their household and care tasks and responsibilities – into a Care/Work Portrait. Informed by conceptual shifts in care theories, the Care/Work Portrait offers theoretical and methodological advantages for studying gendered divisions and relations of household work and care. It attends to unpaid care work/paid work/paid care work intra-connections, moves outside the household to include community-based work, deepens distinctions between tasks and responsibilities, and considers wider forms and contexts of care. This method goes beyond who does what tallies to bring forth relational, temporal, spatial stories about people’s complex care/work configurations and the specific contexts, constraints, supports, and structuring conditions of their lives.

Time use studies, time, temporality, and measuring care: Conceptual, methodological, and epistemological issues

“…Although considerable methodological advancements have been made in time use methods over the past decade, assessments and critiques about the efficacy and applicability of time use studies for measuring the intersections between time and care have been growing. These critiques highlight, for example, the need to attend to the challenges of measuring overlapping categories and activities in everyday life; the relational and processual characteristics of time and care practices and concepts; the multiple meanings and enactments of time and temporalities in different contexts; the epistemological and ontological moorings of time use studies (Bryson, 2008); the gaps between theories of time and methodological approaches to time (e.g., Adam, 1989, 1995, 2006, 2018; Bryson, 2008; Cheng, 2017; Daly, 2002; Davies, 1994, 1996; Maher, 2009); and specific measurement challenges of studying practices, meanings, and spatial boundaries of care work, unpaid work, and community-based care work (e.g., Doucet, 2000, 2023; Doucet and Klostermann, 2023; Taylor, 2016). The papers in this special issue seek to expand time, temporalities, and time use studies discussions, debates, and critiques, especially those related to unpaid care work.…”