University Students’ Weekly Time Use and Its Influential Factors: A Case Study in China

DOI

10.2991/assehr.k.210806.051How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Time use, University students, Weekly panel data, China, Unobserved heterogeneity, Multilevel model, Simultaneous-equation model

Abstract

Time use represents people’s experience of daily lives and has various social meanings. However, existing time use researches in the context of university students have mainly focused on studying time and the association between studying and other activities has been neglected. Besides, existing researches are mainly based on cross-sectional data, which neglects the influences of temporal and individual variations. To tackle the above issues, this study first collected a weekly panel data (sample size: 1,057) of time use, and then built a multilevel utility-maximizing time use model with unobserved variations across individuals and over days of a week. The two types of unobserved variations are represented by introducing two additional error components into the time use model. The utility-maximizing principle reflects decision-making mechanisms. Time use models with decision-making mechanisms are useful to derive more scientifically sound insights than statistically-oriented models. The key findings are, (1) university students make decisions on studying time by considering the association with other activities and such an association is not homogeneous across activities; (2) students’ physical and psychological conditions affect their time use decisions; (3) university students at different grade levels experience different dilemmas between studying and leisure times, between time use within campus and that outside campus; and (4) unobserved day-to-day variations and individual heterogeneity are influential.

Copyright

© 2021, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Jingyao Li
AU  - Shengchuan Zhao
AU  - Junyi Zhang
PY  - 2021
DA  - 2021/08/09
TI  - University Students’ Weekly Time Use and Its Influential Factors: A Case Study in China
BT  - Proceedings of the 2021 5th International Seminar on Education, Management and Social Sciences (ISEMSS 2021)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 266
EP  - 275
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/assehr.k.210806.051
DO  - 10.2991/assehr.k.210806.051
ID  - Li2021
ER  -