Time perceptions and time allocation preferences among adolescent boys and girls

Adolescence,  Spring, 1996  by James E. Bruno

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Purpose

The purpose of this study was to systematically examine how time allocation preferences for directed and nondirected activities (1) vary between boys and girls; and (2) vary between boys and girls classified by their teachers as exhibiting either at-risk or normal behaviors at school.

METHOD

The time allocation preference survey, developed by the author, is based on a conjoint type of analysis where preferences for certain types of allocations are made by the respondent. Students were asked not only to describe their preferences across the four time categories, but to assess their time preferences, taken one at a time (dominance: 30 points); taken two at a time (preference: 15 points); taken three at a time (choice: 10 points); and taken across all four types of time-consuming allocations (indifference: 7 points). Points were awarded for each of the four time allocation scales. Finally, a percentage of the total possible points for each of the four time allocation scales was calculated.

A circles test (Cottle, 1967, 1975, 1976) was then used to determine temporal dominance or the "recognition" of past, present, and future time by the adolescents. It was hypothesized that those considered by their teachers as having at-risk school behaviors would generally have a poor future temporal dominance and less sense of integration among past, present, and future time (memory, action, imagination and vision).

Nearly 500 self-report questionnaires regarding time allocation preferences between outer, other, inner, and nondirected activities and perception of time were collected from various teacher-defined at-risk and normal attaining groups of adolescent boys and girls. The frequency breakdowns, along with percentage of time allocations across the four types of activities are presented in Figure 1.

Taken as a whole, girls tend to have a much higher preference for other-directed activities (friendships or social time), while boys tend to prefer nondirected (hanging out) activities [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED]. Inner- and outer-directed activities were approximately the same for boys and girls.(3) The ratio of directed to nondirected preferences was nearly double for girls (9.8) than for boys (6.0).

Time Allocation                     Boys              Girls

A map of this structure can be found in Figure 8. As can be seen, at-riskness is negative on Dimension I (nondirectedness), while normal attainment is positive on that dimension (outer-directedness), with boys-positive and girls-negative on Dimension II. Thus, nondirected activities (passing time) are usually at the expense of outer-directed activities (studying) and can be considered as a major "marker" for at-risk behaviors in school.

Perception of Time

In addition to determining students' time investment portfolios, a survey was administered to provide a sense of their temporal dominance. This survey, based on the research of Cottle (1967, 1975, 1976), was adapted to include not only drawing circles to represent past, present, and future time, but an explanation in their own words of what the circles represent. The circles test revealed interesting patterns for normal-attaining and at-risk boys and girls [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 10 OMITTED]. In general, larger sized future circles (optimistic future) were drawn by both normal achieving boys and girls. The smallest sized circles (pessimistic future) were drawn by at-risk students. A large number of equal-sized, non-aligned, randomly placed circles were also drawn by at-risk students. Figure 9 reports the frequency of these circles patterns. Note that if one considers small future circles and random equal-sized circles as indicative of weak future temporal dominance, then the average ratio of strong to weak future dominance was over twice that for the normal (14.7) over the at-risk (6.2).