It's About Time

A new open access paper just came out this week, co-authored with UC Santa Cruz sociology Ph.D. student Elena Losada:

• Pedroza, Juan M. and Elena Losada. 2025. "It’s about time: Parent’s direct care for children in Hispanic noncitizen households across state immigration policy contexts." Population Research and Policy Review.

We use time diaries from a national survey to study parent-child activities in immigrant families (American Time Use Survey). We examine whether parents are more likely to spend time with their young children if they live in states with a balance of inclusive policies toward immigrants.

Answer: Yes!

Below is a plot of the main results (Table 3). Only one set of results are significant: among parents in Hispanic noncitizen households, a coefficient of 0.007 (standard error: 0.003; p < 0.05) translates into an 8.7% of a standard deviation change in reporting direct care:

We ran a model robustness analysis to account for over 2 million possible specifications and the results remain reliable among parents in Hispanic noncitizen households. Compare the coefficient in the main results (0.007) to this distribution of possible results:

Finally, we see some partial, mixed evidence that this may apply to developmental care time (sometimes called quality time), spending time outside the home, and longer periods of time spent together.

Acknowledgements: We thank participants for feedback provided at the 2022 annual meeting of the Population Association of America, the Fall 2023 Donald J. Bogue Demography Workshop at the University of Chicago, and the winter 2024 Statistics Department seminar at the University of California, Santa Cruz. We learned from related work by immigration scholars (Elizabeth Ackert, Esther Arenas-Arroyo, and Asad Asad) likewise working with ATUS data to answer important research questions. Kate Chambers Prickett provided invaluable guidance when working with ATUS data. All errors remain our own.

Author Contributions: Data management (Elena and Juan); data analysis (Juan and Elena); writing (Juan & Elena).

Funding: Our research benefited from research funding from the University of California Hellman Fellowship; the Emerging Poverty Scholars Fellowship (University of Wisconsin-Madison, Institute for Research on Poverty, funded by the JPB Foundation); and the Russell Sage Foundation Pipeline Grant. All views are our own.

Data Availability: Files to replicate results presented in this paper are available online. ATUS data are available from IPUMS at www.atusdata.org. All variables we used in our analyses are noted in replication materials. We also include a data file with each variable used to measure state-level contexts. IPC data can be requested online.