Journal of Family Psychology 2001, Vol. 15, No. 2. 206-224 Copyright 2001 by the American Psychological Association, Inc 0893-3200/01/S5.00 DOI: 10.1037//0893-3200.15.2.206 Men's Work and Family Lives in India: The Daily Organization of Time and Emotion Reed Larson University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Suman Verma Government Home Science College Jodi Dworkin University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign This article examines daily patterns of work and family life for a sample of middle-class men in northern India. One hundred fathers of 8th graders provided information on their hour-to-hour time use and subjective states, by means of the experience sampling method. They reported little time spent on family work but substantial amounts of time with their children and thinking about their families. At their jobs, they reported high levels of attention but more negative emotion. By contrast, the home sphere elicited lower attention, more favorable affect, and more feeling of choice. Unlike for American samples, little relationship was found between experience at work and home, including little influence of men's work emotions on the family in the evening. These findings reflect how strong traditional family roles in India shape men's daily lives. Men's daily activities as fathers and husbands do not occur in a vacuum; their participation in the family takes place within and is influenced by the larger temporal and emotional organiza- tion of their daily lives. Across most cultural groups, men are considered to be the primary provider for the family, and earning income is seen to be their foremost contribution to the family (Engle & Breaux, 1998; Lamb, 1987; Reed Larson and Jodi Dworkin, Department of Human and Community Development, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Suman Verma, De- partment of Child Development, Government Home Science College, Chandigarh, India. This work was supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Center on Working Families at the University of Chicago and at the National Opinion Research Cen- ter, and by a Fulbright Grant from the United States Educational Foundation in India. We are grateful to T. S. Saraswathi and Joseph Pleck for assistance in locating sources. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Reed Larson, Department of Human and Community Development, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1105 West Nevada Street, Ur- bana, Illinois 61801. Electronic mail may be sent to larsonR @uiuc.edu. UNICEF, 1995). As a result, men's direct participation in the family is influenced by the timing and emotional rhythms of their income- earning activities. For example, American middle-class men's activities as fathers and hus- bands are structured by employment hours, af- fected by emotional carryover from their jobs, and shaped by their desire to use their home time for relaxation and recovery from the exer- tion of their jobs (Coltrane, 1996; Larson & Richards, 1994; J. H. Pleck, 1997; Repetti, 1989). The effects of men's jobs in shaping and constraining their family participation are particularly evident in Japan, where men's work hours are long and their employment is often located long distances from their home (Shwalb, Imaizumi, & Nakazawa, 1987). This article examines the daily organization of time and emotion among middle-class fathers in In- dia, both as an important end in itself and as a means to gain cross-cultural perspective on the factors structuring men's family participation, particularly their involvement in family work and parenting. To study this organization of daily life, we asked a sample of 100 Indian fathers of eighth graders to provide systematic random reports on their hour-to-hour activities and subjective 206 This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.