8 Application of Time Use Research to the Study of Life with a Disability Wendy E. Pentland and Mary Ann McColl
INTRODUCTION More and more persons with long-term disabilities and chronic illnesses are living in the community. Chronic illness or severe disability can interfere not only with an individual’s ability to perform specific tasks, but can also impair his or her ability to carry out normal life roles associated with self-care, family, productivity, and leisure. Despite the recognition of activity limitation as a measure of disability (World Health Organization, 1998), very little is known about how persons with severe physical disabilities spend their time, and what the relationship is between their activity patterns (time use) and health and well-being. Successful reintegration of both persons with disabilities and those with chronic illness constitutes a social change, and it has been advocated that time use patterns in a society may ultimately be the only way of assessing social change (Gutenschwager, 1973). One of the benefits of studying time use is that it gives us a way of understanding activity patterns. Activity patterns of subgroups within the population, when compared Wendy E. Pentland and Mary Ann McColl • Division of Occupational Therapy, School of Rehabilitation Therapy, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario K7L 3N6 Time Use Research in the Social Sciences, edited by Wendy E. Pentland, Andrew S. Harvey, M. Powell Lawton, and Mary Ann McColl. Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, New York, 1999. 169