American adults now spend an extra hour and 39 minutes at home on a typical day compared with 2003. The pandemic sped the shift up, but it did not start it: time at home was already climbing steadily for 16 years before COVID-19 arrived.
The analysis, by Patrick Sharkey of the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs, was published on August 2, 2024, in the open-access journal Sociological Science under the title “Homebound: The Long-Term Rise in Time Spent at Home Among U.S. Adults”.
Nineteen years of time diaries
Sharkey used the American Time Use Survey, in which a nationally representative sample of people aged 15 and older describe everything they did over a 24-hour period, along with where they were and who they were with. He compared each year from 2003 to 2022 with 2003, adjusting for changes in age, income, employment, family structure and other characteristics.
Time at home rose gradually through 2019, jumped in 2020 and dipped only slightly in 2021 and 2022. The total increase of 99 minutes a day is roughly 10% of the time people spent at home in 2003. Counting waking hours only, the share of the day spent at home rose by 10 percentage points.
The rise appeared in every group Sharkey examined, and every age group spent more than an hour longer at home in 2022 than in 2003. It was largest among the young: people aged 15 to 24 spent 57 more minutes at home per day in 2019 than in 2003, and 124 more by 2022. It was also stronger among men, employed people, higher earners and the college educated, which means it is not a story about disadvantage.
Almost everything moved indoors
Part of the change came from people doing less of the things that happen outside, such as shopping, socializing, volunteering and traveling. But most came from familiar activities relocating. About 71% of the increase is explained by six activities shifting into the home: work, school, eating and drinking, leisure without a computer, sports and exercise, and religious activity.
Just 13% of work-related activity happened at home in 2003; by 2022 that share had more than doubled. The share of education done at home had already risen 12 percentage points before the pandemic. Religious activity at home was up 17 points by 2019 and 26 points by 2022. The only activities that moved the other way were phone calls and leisure computer use, thanks to mobile phones and laptops.
More family, fewer friends, less happiness
Each extra hour at home was linked with 7.4 more minutes with family, 5.0 fewer minutes with friends and 21.0 more minutes alone. The much-discussed rise in time spent alone since the pandemic was fully explained once time at home was taken into account.
Using a well-being module from 2010, 2012 and 2013, Sharkey found that activities done at home were rated as less happy and less meaningful than the same kinds of activities done elsewhere, whether comparing one person’s activities or different people doing the same activity. Home showed no link with sadness, and the results for stress depended on the method.
Sharkey calls this evidence descriptive and preliminary, not proof that staying home causes unhappiness. He also checked whether survey nonresponse or interview methods could produce the trend, and concluded they might affect its size but are unlikely to explain it away.
Study Details:
- Title: Homebound: The Long-Term Rise in Time Spent at Home Among U.S. Adults
- Authors: Patrick Sharkey
- Journal: Sociological Science, Vol. 11, pp. 553-578
- Publication Date: August 2, 2024
- DOI: 10.15195/v11.a20