From 07.00 to 22.00: a dual-earner typical day in Italy: Old questions and new evidences from social sequence analysis.

The paper analyses the daily activities of dual-earner couples in Italy. The goal is to discover how Italian dual-earner couples organize their daily activities (sleep, personal care, work, moving, housework, free time), during a typical work day from Monday to Friday. The analysis, carried out on data from the 2008 Italian Census on Time Use (the last one available), involves all the 873 couples that filled in their diaries on the same day. Using the binary index (Bison, 2006, 2011a, 2011b, 2014; Bison, Rettore, Schizzerotto 2010; Franzosi, Bison 2010), we conduct a ‘multichannel’ analyses on the dual-earner couple’s activities from 7.00 to 22.00. Quite strong relations with socio-demo-geographic conditions emerge from these analyses. Hence there is a strong relation of time packaging and the time spent on the various activities according to where couples live with respect to both geographical area (North, Centre and South & Islands) and the size of the town (metropolitan, more than 50,000 residents, from 10,000 to 50,000, fewer than 10,000). Strong relations also emerge with the level of education, the social class and the occupational sector of Him and Her. Relations with the presence of children are observed mainly at the beginning and the end of the day. At the same time, the different time packaging profile of the dual-earner couple that emerges from the k-means cluster analysis seems to have a direct effect on His and Her level of satisfaction. All the preliminary analyses seem to confirm the idea that dual-earner couples package their life time mainly in accordance with their jobs. Moreover, the analyses show that this time packaging changes in relation to the kind of job (social class) and the occupational sector. Secondly, the time spent on each activity changes according to the level of education of Him and Her, but there is an additional effect due to the social and cultural level of the area where they live.