Time Use in the Transition to Adulthood: Cross-National Compari

A recent UNICEF report offers the first multi-dimensional overview of children’s and adolescents’ well-being for rich OECD countries (UNICEF, 2007). The Netherlands scored the highest overall on UNICEF’s multidimensional scale that provides a broad picture of child and adolescent well-being, while the United Kingdom scored the lowest among the 21 countries that were ranked. The report notes differences between countries in both the overall measure of well-being and in the specific subscales used. In this paper, we attempt to uncover contextual differences in adolescent time use that may underlie some of these differences in scores. To do this, we focus on time use in two countries – Finland, which had a relatively high ranking (4 th overall), and the United States, which had a relatively low ranking (20 th overall). Our goal is to provide detailed descriptions of adolescent time use with an eye toward raising questions about how time use and its correlates may link to some of the more global measures of child and adolescent well-being used in the UNICEF study.