Care Work Measurement

Supervisory care is time spent responsible for and available to a dependent — a sleeping child, an elderly parent — without performing a discrete task. Because there is no observable activity to record, respondents asked 'what were you doing?' simply do not report it, and standard diaries miss it. Yet it constrains the carer's time and movement as much as active care does. Capturing it requires explicit prompts about responsibility and availability, not just about activities, which is why instruments that omit such prompts systematically undercount care.

Two main approaches are used. The opportunity-cost method values an hour of unpaid care at the wage the carer could have earned in paid work. The replacement-cost method values it at the wage of a market substitute, such as a domestic worker or professional carer. The two can give very different totals — a highly paid professional's forgone wage versus a domestic worker's wage — so the chosen method, and the wage benchmark, must always be stated. Both are described in the UN time-use guide and the ILO framework.

A time-use diary asks respondents to record their actual activities across the day in short intervals, capturing sequence and simultaneity, and is the gold standard for accuracy. A stylized question instead asks people to estimate, after the fact, how many hours they usually spend on listed activities. Stylized questions are cheap enough to add to large multi-topic surveys but suffer from recall error, rounding, and overcounting because respondents report overlapping activities separately. Comparing the two requires caution.