Cognitive Surplu$

January 14, 2012 5:08 PM

Is time spent watching TV correlated with income?

I know the answer to this question could be either a yes or a no, but it would be interesting to see people's thought on this. Have there been studies about this? If anyone knows, I would appreciate if you pointed me to them

posted by JayCruz to work & money (12 answers total)

Sounds like something you can look at using the general social survey.
posted by stratastar at 5:33 PM on January 14

American Time Use Survey 2010, Table 11 "Time spent in leisure and sports activities for the civilian population by selected characteristics, 2010 annual averages"

Lower income people spend more time watching TV (during the week, it will partially be due to working fewer hours = lower income, but also more free time/ more time to watch TV). There's a more (negative) linear relationship between hours spent watching TV and educational attainment.
posted by milkrate at 5:38 PM on January 14

Google throws up a few things that suggest that higher income correlates to lower TV watching, including the following:

Finally, the researchers examined data from a nationwide Bureau of Labor Statistics survey on how people with varying household income levels spend their time. These data show that people with higher incomes devote relatively more of their time to work, shopping, childcare and other "obligatory" activities. Women surveyed by the researchers in Ohio associated those activities with "higher tension and stress." People with higher incomes spend less time on "passive leisure" activities such as socializing or watching television, which the respondents viewed as more enjoyable.

Source: Link between income and happiness is mainly an illusion

Interestingly it seems that this likely holds even for *children* living in high income neighborhoods, and even after factoring out income differences per se:

Living in high income areas was associated with less television watching, a finding that held even when controlling for parental education, household income and race.

Source: Neighbourhood environment as a predictor of television watching among girls
posted by philipy at 5:55 PM on January 14

people with higher incomes devote relatively more of their time to work

There you go. Short of any dated "idiot box" moralism, people who aren't working have more time to watch tv. I suspect it's that simple, unless we start talking about countries where TV is not widely available to poorer people.
posted by drjimmy11 at 6:38 PM on January 14 [2 favorites]

More money, more options.
posted by Miko at 7:19 PM on January 14 [1 favorite]

...in other words, more options, less time resorting to TV as the default pastime. For a $50 cable bill or a cable antenna, you get 24/7 availability of something to do with your leisure time. With more money, you can use your leisure time instead to exercise choices like dining out, going to classes, shopping, going to movies, concerts, plays, or shows, traveling, hanging around online, cooking, doing crafts, playing in leagues or any number of other pastimes that, though fun and rewarding, come with a cost.
posted by Miko at 7:23 PM on January 14 [5 favorites]

It's pretty well documented that lower-income children watch more TV than richer kids. (It's also documented that kids' media usage tracks the parents'.)

See this Annenberg study (pdf warning!) from a few years ago (p. 17-20):

Children from low-income homes are more likely to have television sets in their bedrooms than children from higher income homes.

In terms of family income, children from households with higher annual incomes watch significantly less television, and spend less time watching videotapes and playing video games than families with lower incomes.

(By a LOT, too: "Poorest-vs.-richest" is 173 minutes/day vs. 119 min. a day.)
posted by AsYouKnow Bob at 10:08 PM on January 14

Just speculation, but both the lessened TV watching and higher achievement levels probably correlate with "ability to delay."
posted by limeonaire at 8:03 AM on January 15 [1 favorite]

I think this Annenberg study supports my conjectures.

y, 50 percent of parents who work full time outside of the home have children with bedroom television sets compared to only 41 percent of parents who do not work full time outside of the home...Among single parent households with no other adult caretakers living in thehousehold, 57 percent have children with bedroom television sets compared to 45 percent of households with multiple adult caretakers present. Thus, bedroomtelevision sets may be a resource used by parents whose supervisory role is constrained by work commitments and/or the absence of parental assistance.

and

In the lowest income category, media ownership appears to primarily provide leisure time activity through video games (generally an entertainment vehicle) followed by the provision of computers (generally considered an educational resource). The Internet is least present in households in this income category, even less so than newspaper subscriptions. In middle-income households, computers are more widely available than video games. The Internet is also more likely to be found than the newspaper in the
middle-income household. In the highest income families, both electronic information resources are most widely available, computers and Internet access. The implication of this finding is that children from higher income households have more informational tools and resources available in the home. The media that is equally likely to be found in lower, middle, and upper class homes is the video game. Computer ownership,Internet access, and newspaper subscriptions all increase as income increases.

So we have a supervisory time crunch where parents may lean on television to occupy the kids while they work and/or do household tasks which are harder to get done because of working hours or being single parents; we have a digital divide which removes the choice of internet and other periodical reading from the house; and we have a lack of money for other options among lower-income families. I think there are a lot of structural/systemic causes here before making the leap to character-based or values-based explanations. "Do more and more varied things with your leisure time" is certainly a middle-class value, but that's largely because it can be.
posted by Miko at 8:53 AM on January 15 [2 favorites]

All your answers have been superb. What sparked my interest in searching if there were any studies was this blog post I read titled The 99% are watching four to five hours of Tv a day and other tales of the present. I thought that was an interesting premise and wondered if there was any proof to that. Clearly, the author of that post dislikes Television, but he does have a point.

This question sparks a lot of other questions like, how much of the so called 1% reached that 1% by effort? Effort meaning spending more time than the average joe on the act of making money. Because that's the whole argument with the 99% vs 1%, that they didn't get their by merit, and while they probably watch less Tv, that probably doesn't have that much to do with their wealth.
posted by JayCruz at 10:03 AM on January 15

There's been a lot of discussion of that, here especially on the blue, and there is research on how the rich get where they are, and how much familial resources and simple privilege play a part in it. It definitely does not come down to something as simple as rate of television watching, which is more a bellwether of economic problems than a problem in itself. You can look up the more directly related information or use another AskMe to find it.
posted by Miko at 2:36 PM on January 15

One thing unspecified is whether you're looking at the world or just the US. Because I bet if you took global viewing stats you'd see a different picture. I vaguely recall a Freakonomics or Planet Money or some other econblog story about a program assisting rural poor in Central America with cash and discovering that most of them bought TVs with it instead of productivity enhancing tools. I did find a random UN whitepaper on rural electrification that promoted increased viewership of TV/radio as a feature.

I figure that hours viewed better (negatively) correlates with hours worked than raw income, because there's plenty of retirees in the US with income and no job.
posted by pwnguin at 4:38 PM on January 15 [1 favorite]