The Time that Matters. Communitarian Care: Measuring and Thinking about the Invisible in Time Poverty

Abstract

Introduction: This article contributes to the conceptual and methodological discussion on communitarian care and its relationship with time poverty. It adopts a multidimensional and context-sensitive approach grounded in the centrality of life-sustaining activities and in the Tunequal time burdens they place on women. Methodology: The article combines a critical review of the specialized literature on communitarian care with a comparative analysis of Time Use Surveys (TUS), with particular attention to Latin America. Results: Communitarian care is generally reduced to institutionalized activities (e.g., volunteering, participation in neighbourhood organizations or political parties) and/or limited to care of children and older adults between households. As a result, informal, self-managed, and territorially situated collective practices remain largely invisible. Discussion: TUS and similar instruments should include questions related to time spent in care networks and in self-managed or informal collective spaces (such as soup kitchens, donation drives, cleaning shared spaces, awareness campaigns, or community outreach), even including time spent in commuting and coordination. Conclusions: the article proposes a framework for improving future time-use measurements. This framework rests on three pillars: incorporating communitarian care through a household/collective continuum, recognizing the territorial dimension of time use from an intersectional perspective, and complementing quantitative measurement with qualitative and interpretive approaches.