Patrick Sharkey

Who they are

Sharkey's paper is the best available description of where Americans have been for two decades, and it is also, unusually, a model of what a researcher should do when a finding lands in the middle of a public argument. He took the American Time Use Survey, the same instrument Scott Wallsten used for the marginal substitution rates, and asked a simpler question across a longer window: how much of the day is spent at home, and has that changed?

The answer is 99 minutes more in 2022 than in 2003, roughly ten per cent of the 2003 baseline. He reports it from a model controlling for changing economic and demographic characteristics, and notes that the simple weighted means for the two end years give an identical difference, so the trend is not an artefact of a changing population. The shape is as important as the size: rising steadily from 2003 to 2019, a sharp jump in 2020, a slight decline in 2021 and 2022. The pandemic accelerated something that was already nineteen years old.

What makes him the standard this publication holds up is the next page of the paper. Sharkey writes that the survey "does not have precise questions that track the amount of time on smartphones or social media", says a role for social media is plausible, and calls for alternative data sources to test it. He then argues against the simple reading in his own voice, pointing out that many activities with little to do with new technology also moved indoors, and that mobile phones and laptops have made it easier to use the internet outside the home rather than harder. He names alternatives: fear or discomfort in public space, including the rise in gun violence and the long-term rise of mass shootings, and increases in the size of homes. And he states flatly that identifying the causal effect of the rise in time at home is beyond the scope of the analysis.

That matters because his number is the one most likely to be conscripted. A ten per cent rise in time at home across nineteen years is exactly the figure a screens argument wants, and the person who produced it says his instrument cannot see the screen. Any article attaching the 99 minutes to phones has removed a limitation that appears in the same paper as the finding.

He reports one further result with his own hedge attached: preliminary analysis indicates that time at home is associated with lower levels of happiness and less meaning, and he says the data cannot establish whether being at home has a causal effect on wellbeing. It should be reported as he labelled it or not at all.

Key papers

Sharkey is a working social scientist and his contribution here is a journal article rather than a trade book. This publication has verified no book of his and does not list one rather than padding the page with a guess.

Sharkey, P. (2024). "Homebound: The Long-Term Rise in Time Spent at Home Among U.S. Adults." Sociological Science, 11, 553-578. doi:10.15195/v11.a20. Open access, with a replication package deposited at the Harvard Dataverse. The 99-minute rise, its shape before and after 2020, its breadth across the population, and the limitations section that governs how the figure may be used.

Key ideas

Time spent at home by American adults rose by one hour and thirty-nine minutes a day between 2003 and 2022, for every subset of the population and virtually all activities.

The trend predates the pandemic. It rose steadily from 2003 to 2019, jumped in 2020, and has declined slightly since.

The instrument cannot see the cause. The American Time Use Survey has no precise questions tracking smartphone or social-media time, and the breadth of the trend across technology-irrelevant activities complicates any simple internet explanation.

Work and education moved home before 2020. Work-related activity at home rose two percentage points between 2003 and 2019 and remained fourteen points higher in 2022; education-related activity at home rose twelve points before the pandemic.

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