Dealing with Daily Rhythms: Families’ Strategies to Tackle Chronic Time Pressure

Abstract

As suggested by the conservation of resources theory, in contemporary societies time is considered as a limited resource in the same way as money and energy. In the current paper, a novel daily rhythm approach related to motility is presented, in order to highlight the effects of life acceleration on family life management and other professional, leisure, and consumption activities. The analysis is based on a qualitative survey involving 20 families (40 interviewees) that include long-distance commuters living in the suburban areas of Voiron and Thionville in France. These families are composed of an active couple and at least two children under 18 years of age, and the couple commutes at least 60 km every day between home and work. Based on this particularly stressful daily configuration, the qualitative survey deals with the modalities of managing daily time between and within these couples. The quantitative and qualitative analysis of the corpus of interviews shows first, a very high daily rhythm, and second, the diversity of strategies that lead to a typology of resources used to deal with daily time pressures. The results suggest that forms of time-related vulnerabilities depend on social, economic, and temporal resources, while confirming the importance of rhythms analysis in the daily mobility field and in the resource theory.