Recent changes in family arrangements and employment patterns have renewed scholarly interest in the behavior of family members and in the ways that family members make locational decisions, both individually and collectively. Some of the most abrupt shifts in householders' behavior comes immediately after a child is born. This project will analyze the impacts of the birth of a child on the activities and responsibilities of a sample of San Diego metropolitan household members, paying special attention to the ways that individuals' alter their use of time. Impacts on spatial behavior, including changes in places of work, commuting patterns, and shopping behavior, also will be examined. Data will be gathered through a series of questionnaires to be administered annually over a five-year period to members of a large number of different types of households. These questionnaires will elicit data on household member's daily activities, on their family and other responsibilities, and on their mobility. Qualitative and statistical analyses of these data will be complemented by detailed time-budget surveys of a subsample of families taken at three times for each family (before the birth of a child, immediately after the birth, and four years later). One of the largest health-maintenance organizations in the San Diego area is providing additional financial and in-kind support to assist in completion of this project. This project should provide valuable new information about the ways that members of different types of household alter their use of time and their behavior in space after the addition of a child to the family. Data from the questionnaires, time-budget surveys, and interviews will provide new insights about changes in behavior resulting from abrupt transformation of families and about the relationship of those changes to family members' attitudes and feelings and to associated geographic conditions. Resulting analyses should also provide new information about broader issues of household formation and persistence, home-work relationships for family members, and gender differences in temporal and geographic adjustments.
