How Much Children Work: Questionnaires Versus Time Use Diaries

Journal:American Economic Review

Key Words:child labour work hours diaries

Abstract:The International Labour Organization (ILO) started the production of global child labour estimates in 1995 and has continued to monitor them ever since. An important component of the child labour definition is the amount of work that children do, which is measured with questions like the following: “How many hours did you work las week?”. Many studies have shown the important biases present in estimates derived from such questions among adults in wealthy countries, but no study to date has analysed those for children in a low- and middle-income context. This is the first paper to do so by comparing the estimates produced by a questionnaire and a time use diary using data from eight countries low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) that vary in terms of income and geographic location and including countries as important as China or India. If the estimates derived from questionnaires differ from those based on diaries – which have been validated (Gershuny et al. 2020; Kelly et al. 2015), it indicates an opportunity to enhance the accuracy of child labour estimates by improving the accuracy in the measurement of working time sources. The paper finds that time use diaries report almost 3 times more working hours than the questionnaires, which is significantly more than any discrepancy ever found for the work of adults in wealthy countries. These larger discrepancies may be attributed to the more variable nature of work schedules among children in LMICs, as well as potential challenges in accurately recalling or reporting children's activities, either by the children themselves or their proxies, particularly for very young children. The paper also shows that some activities such as collecting water and firewood, or work-related travel are more likely to be omitted in questionnaires than other productive activities.

First Author:Tang Jialu

Indexed by:SSCI

Discipline:Economics

Translation or Not:no