• Posted October 31, 2024

Staying In: Did Pandemic Shift Americans' Leisure-Time Habits Permanently?

The COVID-19 pandemic appears to have created a nation of homebodies in the United States, a new study finds.

People are spending nearly an hour less each day doing activities outside the home, researchers reported Oct. 31 in the Journal of the American Planning Association.

In essence, not going out has become the “new normal” post-COVID, experts say.

Since 2019, there’s been an overall drop of about 51 minutes in the daily time spent on out-of-home activities, researchers found.

People also spend about 12 minutes less time on daily travel in cars or public transportation.

This decrease in time spent away from home appears to be a lasting consequence of the pandemic, researchers said, and it will affect society on many levels.

For example, cities will need to rethink their dependence on folks who commute in for their workdays, noted the researchers, who are urban planners.

“In a world where cities cannot rely on captive office workers and must work to attract residents, workers and customers, local officials might seek to invest more heavily in their remaining strengths,” said lead study author Eric Morris, a professor of city and regional planning at Clemson University in South Carolina.

“These include opportunities for recreation, entertainment, culture, arts and more,” Morris added in a journal news release. “Central cities might shift toward becoming centers of consumption more than production.”

For the study, researchers analyzed data from 34,000 Americans who participated in the American Time Use Survey, an annual review conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau. 

The team grouped time use into 16 home-based activities like sleep, exercise and work, as well as 12 out-of-home activities like arts and sporting events, shopping, work and attending church.

Time spent on 8 of the 12 out-of-home activities fell between 2019 and 2021, while 11 of the 16 in-home activities gained time, results showed.

The average time for out-of-home activities fell from about 5.5 hours a day in 2019 to 4.5 hours in 2021, researchers found.

They also found that time spent away from home has only modestly recovered following the pandemic, rebounding by just 11 minutes from 2021 to 2023.

All out-of-home time, all forms of travel and seven out-of-home activities remained notably lower in 2023 than 2019, while eight in-home activities remained higher, researchers said.

Improvements in information technology is one of the key drivers in this trend, researchers found. Shopping is easier and quicker online at home; streaming allows people to watch movies at their leisure.

People also are performing more exercise at home, because many bought in-home gym equipment during lockdowns and social distancing.

As a result of all this, city centers might focus on creating dense multiunit housing favored by younger people and those who prefer an urban lifestyle, researchers said.

Likewise, transportation policies might do better to focus on pedestrian and cyclist safety, rather than building more lanes to accommodate rush-hour travel, researchers said.

More information

The World Economic Forum has more on how the pandemic changed society.

SOURCE: Taylor & Francis Group, news release, Oct. 31, 2024