Matthew Andersson and Paul Froese

Transcript

Derek Smith:
Hello and welcome to Baylor Connections, a conversation series with the people shaping our future. Each week we go in depth with Baylor leaders, professors, and more discussing important topics in higher education, research and student life. I'm Derek Smith, and today we are talking time disorientation with two leaders in the Baylor Religion Surveys. We're visiting with Dr. Paul Froese and Dr. Matthew Andersson.
Paul Froese, serves as professor of sociology and the director of the Baylor Religion Surveys, one of the most extensive national surveys of American religious beliefs, values and behaviors. His research interests include the sociology of meaning, religion, ideology, and more. Matthew Andersson researches health inequality and his work is focused on health behaviors, chronic disease, social networks, parenthood, caregiving, public attitudes towards mental health illness and much more. Some complimentary skills that you both bring into this topic of time, disorientation and the Baylor Religion Survey as well. Dr. Froese. Dr. Andersson, thanks so much for taking the time to share with us today.

Paul Froese:
Thank you for having us.

Matthew Andersson:
Thank you.

Derek Smith:
Well, it's great to have you here. I have a feeling as we talk about time disorientation, there's going to be a lot of people nodding their heads or realizing that there's a name for something they've been feeling in recent years. Before we really dive into that, you all have very multifaceted research backgrounds. Dr. Froese, I'll start with you. If we were to look at some of your more recent research topics or common themes, where are some of the places we would find those interests taking you?

Paul Froese:
I mean, I'm known as kind a sociologist of religion, and I think within that I'm kind of interested in ideology, so kind of belief systems. I'm really looking at belief systems and how they affect behavior.

Derek Smith:
What about you, Dr. Andersson?

Matthew Andersson:
Well, for me, I consider myself a sociologist of health. Most of my research is taking me in the direction of just trying to understand where inequalities in health come from, just why some people end up healthier than others. The approach I take to that really depends on the data source I'm using.

Derek Smith:
Dr. Andersson, I think you just kind of answered the next question I was going to ask you, but I'll ask you specifically and then you as well, Dr. Froese, the questions or problems that compel you work, the things that keep you up at night, if you start thinking about them, what are some of those things in your academic work?

Matthew Andersson:
I'll go ahead and start. For me, recently I've been preoccupied with this idea of dignity actually. For the past couple of years, I put together and finished a book related to what we called the science of dignity. For me, the big puzzle there, which probably did lead to a couple of nights of less than optimal sleep, was can we measure dignity in a way that allows us to understand where it comes from and what it means to people? Thanks to the Baylor Religion Survey, which Dr. Froese ministers, we were able to look at both things at once.
We were able to really look at who feels they have dignity within their lives and just where does it come from. We were able to discover for the first time that dignity is rooted in a few things. It's rooted in feeling respected by others, it's rooted in the close relationships that people have and whether they feel they can be authentic within those relationships. It's also just rooted in having basic resources for living, such as financial security, food security, but also education and income really help. Other than that, people want to feel in control of their lives, a sense of control. They want to feel a sense of mattering to other people and that their life is meaningful. If you put all those ingredients together, we found using the Baylor Religion Survey, that those are the most dignified lives, the ones that have those ingredients. So that was kind of my challenge most recently.

Paul Froese:
Well, it's interesting because that overlaps really with many things that I'm interested in. I guess that's why Matt and I are collaborating.

Matthew Andersson:
Yeah.

Paul Froese:
One of the struggles I've had in my research career is a few years ago I wrote a book on purpose and kind of following up with what Matt said about meaning, I was very interested in how people construct meaning, in particular how they think about the purpose of their lives. In doing that research, it was very interesting, but it also kind of made me question my own purpose in a way that I wasn't expecting when I was doing the research. That was kind of challenging.
In conducting that research, I discovered a lot of things. In fact, some of the things I discovered is going to lead to our topic today, time, in looking at how people find their purpose in life. Clearly religion tends to play a big role for a lot of people. It kind of gives them a meaning. Structure, family and relationships are also incredibly important, they give people meaning, give people a reason to get up in the morning and then of course career. I would look at survey data and I do interviews and pursue this thing.
What I realized was in doing interviews, an answer that came up a lot is, "Well, I don't really think about my purpose because I don't have time." I thought, "Well, that's kind of interesting, that you don't have time to think about what the meaning of your life is." That then got me into the sociology of time, which is all about how our modern world is speeding up and it's rushing. Maybe we're so caught up in the pace of life, we actually can never just have a moment to sit and look at it and think about it.

Derek Smith:
Well, I'm guessing a lot of us can relate to that on some level, either short term or long-term as we visit with Paul Froese and Matthew Andersson from Baylor Sociology. Well, you just said it kind of came from the Baylor Religion Survey, so this topic of time disorientation, when and how did this first rise to the level of something you wanted to look into further?

Paul Froese:
I'll start, and I'll just say that when we were developing the last wave of the survey, something funny happened is that right before it was going to be administered, I realized that we had space on the survey that I didn't realize we had. Because I'd just written this chapter about time in this book, I thought, "Well, wouldn't it be cool to have some time variables," some questions about time in that. I immediately thought of Matt Andersson, and so I contacted him and then together we came up with a very quickly kind of a battery of questions about how people felt about time.

Matthew Andersson:
Absolutely. Like Paul said, his own book project was really formative in bringing us to that interest in the first place. Beyond that, I was really pleased at how, contrary to a lot of other very popular surveys, so for example, the American Time Use Survey where they ask people in detail about to itemize their days essentially to say, "Well, how much time do you spend doing housework? How much time do you spend at your job? How much time do you spend with childcare?" Those kind of get at the nitty-gritty of how people spend their days, but they don't get at how people actually feel about time, their relationship with time, like Paul was saying, not just how rushed do they feel, but do they just feel like that time is out of their hands or they can't quite sync up with life?
Part of the contribution of what we're doing and what Paul was really pushing us to do is to put multiple items on there because the American Time Use survey only asks whether people feel rushed or pressed and they stop there. If we had not come up with the idea of multiple items, we never would've discovered this concept of time disorientation, not at the level that we were able to characterize it.

Paul Froese:
Part of this idea of multiple different types of time disorientation, and when we say time disorientation, what we mean is that people tend to have a sense of how time should pass.

Matthew Andersson:
Yes.

Paul Froese:
When it's not passing that way, they feel disoriented. We've all had that experience. You're having a really good time. You're like, "Wow, an hour went by already, I didn't realize that," or you're super bored and you're like, "Well, this is taking forever." People are very conscious of this kind of idea of like, "Oh, time's not passing in the way that I'm kind of expecting it to." Our questions are really tapping into that. As Matt just said, one of the innovations, was a lot of the time literature is focused on how rushed we feel, and that is totally true.

Matthew Andersson:
Which makes perfect sense, right?

Paul Froese:
Totally in the modern era.

Matthew Andersson:
Exactly. Yeah.

Paul Froese:
Then I thought, especially during the pandemic, this is when we were creating this survey, we started thinking about boredom, right? You're sitting around, you're in your house, well, maybe time's passing really slowly.

Matthew Andersson:
Events are canceled and yeah.

Paul Froese:
Exactly. Then we thought, we should ask about that too. The third innovation was also maybe people are disoriented of where they are in the week like, "Os it Tuesday today or is it Saturday or I don't know what it is."

Matthew Andersson:
Yeah.

Paul Froese:
We asked about did time seem to blend? Are they unable to figure out where they are in the month, where they are in the week? We asked about all these different forms of disorientation.

Matthew Andersson:
Yeah, so I think the bottom line is we just really discovered how people's sense of time is tethered to the routines that they keep. If you disrupt those routines, you're going to disrupt people's sense of time as well.

Derek Smith:
I've realized as we get at the heart of what it is and what it isn't, I realized that sometime in the last few years I hit an age where if I say something that happened a couple years ago, it might literally be two, it might be nine or 10. We've probably all dealt with that, right? You hear people, "Our kids are growing up so fast," or, "I can't believe that was five years ago now," or what have you. I think as we talked, that's not what you're talking about, is it? Or is it? What is time disorientation as we talk about this on the rest of the show?

Matthew Andersson:
Thank you so much for that follow up. I just want to quickly build on what Paul said. Time disorientation is really interesting because it's not literally about the number of calendar months or the number of minutes that have clicked by on the hand of a clock or something. It's almost about, like Paul said, how we feel time should be passing because some people expect to live a rushed life. If you put 10 different appointments in their day, they wouldn't feel rushed because that's what they want. But like Paul said, people have an internal sense of how they think time should go, and it's different for everyone. Because of that, we need to ask people directly, "Do you feel like life is rushing by? Do you feel like life is too slow?" That'll mean something slightly different depending on how people are brought up, the context that they're in, their personality and so forth.

Paul Froese:
I think part of the whole thing of disorientation is, and maybe this is where your questions coming from, Derek, is like, what exactly are we measuring here? Part of the research we were doing is that we know people have these perceptions of either things going slow or fast or blended, what's the meaning of them? In this paper, what we show is they're connected to mental health outcomes. The more disoriented you feel, the more likely you're maybe anxious, maybe you're depressed, maybe you're lonely. We're kind of linking this disorientation of time to other measures of mental health.

Derek Smith:
This is Baylor Connections. We are visiting with Paul Froese, professor of sociology, and Matthew Andersson, associate professor of sociology, talking time disorientation. There's another element that's interesting, I know certainly what I think a lot of people can relate to as well. About four years ago at this time, we were in the final weeks of the buildup to the shutdowns around COVID-19 and its disruptions on daily life. I'm curious whether it's COVID-19 or whether it's other disruptions, what impact can disruptions have on time disorientation? I'm just making a connection where maybe there isn't one, but we hear a lot of talk about mental health and the challenges people have felt during and after COVID-19 and the pandemic, and just wonder how much of a relationship there might be there or how much they all just play a role, a piece of the pie, if you will.

Matthew Andersson:
Yeah. Thank you for that question, Derek. I'll take it then I want to hand it to Paul right away. As we were drafting this study, we realized as we were going along that we just need to, like you said, Derek, we basically need to look specifically at sources of stress during the pandemic. We need to measure those and we need to see how are those related to people's sense of time. What we discovered is that when people were working from home or when they had severe conflict at home or financial hardship during the pandemic, or when they were homeschooling a child, just all these stressors that we associate with the pandemic, they were more likely to experience time disruption. How big is that effect, right? Well, you can compare that to the number of hours that they work. You can compare that to their age, you can compare that to their income level. It rivals all of those, which are the leading explanations for people's sense of time. Specific pandemic stress is just as important.

Paul Froese:
Yeah, I mean that's very interesting that you brought that up, Matt, in that we tend to think of in normal times, let's put it this way, time disorientation is related to stratification. In other words, inequality in our society, is that people with less bear the burden of a lot of things in our society. What Matt just said is our findings, which our data was collected during the pandemic, it shows that covid related stressors overwhelm those other things that usually predict time disorientation. There was something, and this should I guess, be obvious to all of us who lived through the pandemic, that the pandemic was very severe, and it really changed our culture, how we understand things, how we live our lives, and in our case in this research, how we understood time.

Derek Smith:
You'll hear people being self-critical sometimes thinking, "Oh, I can't believe," or, "I just can't seem to get back on track. It feels like it's moving so fast." What I hear maybe is on some of them, maybe they shouldn't be quite so hard on themselves because that's an understandable reaction. As we think about some of these factors, are there elements of this that you learned that can be helpful to people that they can think about even just being aware of time disorientation and what it is and maybe trying to reverse engineer what healthy time orientation looks like?

Matthew Andersson:
Absolutely. We were trying to walk away from this research with, first of all, just an understanding of what are the larger factors beyond individual lives that are shaping our experience of time? Certainly, I think it's right that people will sometimes blame themselves for not being able to keep a schedule or keep the pace that they want. Clearly we were seeing that the stage that people were at in life in terms of their age, in terms of taking care of children, in terms of confronting stress, that, like Paul said, most people we're confronting, these are far bigger and more powerful explanations than anyone's time management skills mean. That was a very important conclusion of our research. Yeah, like we're saying, so what do we do about it? I think that what to do about it is going to, in some ways follow from what we found, but in other ways we may need to be more innovative beyond that.
I think from what we found, it's clear that just naturally some of this disorientation is going to dissipate as the pandemic dissipates. Our hope is also that by recognizing the larger social processes at play, people might be able to form a new relationship to how they think about time, in other words, beyond just a personal schedule. I think part of the intervention here, if we want to think about it that way, might just be, I'm kind of getting the knowledge out there about, well, how do people really think about time? Because how people think about time, is as important as the literal number of hours they work or literally how busy they are. I think some of this just might come down to mindset and changing mindset.

Paul Froese:
Riffing off of that is this, I mean, one of the problems that us as sociologists always face is that we're always looking at these kind of larger macro phenomenon and then seeing how they affect individuals. When you kind of ask for solutions, it's like, well, I can't rule the world and change everything.

Derek Smith:
Yeah.

Paul Froese:
Kind of like Matt said, maybe the individual realizing that they don't have control over this stuff, that it is quite normal to feel rushed, especially in the modern world, and that that's not their fault. If you look at the history of the sociology of time, one of, I think the insights is not only that with modernity, time feels like it's sped up. We have so many more things to do and take care of, and it gets overwhelming, and that time becomes completely mechanized.
Now, we all have clocks and watches, and so our whole sense of time is based on a mechanized system that we've invented. Whereas when you think about, let's say 500 years ago, how did people live? They lived to the seasons, to the rhythm of the day. Their lives were in kind of rhythms to the natural world. We've, as humans, separated ourselves from the natural world. Now we sit in air-conditioned and heating comfort with clocks ticking next to us. That's a very different kind of life and world than humans evolved to live in. Kind of a theme that goes throughout sociology is modernity is tough on the human. We're all just struggling to figure out how to keep surviving.

Derek Smith:
Fascinating. No, appreciate those insights. I will clarify, maybe I should have clarified at the beginning of the question, I'm not asking you to give any medical diagnoses or any pure mental health advice, but what you said was very interesting about some things you took away from the survey as we visit with Dr. Paul Froese and Dr. Matthew Andersson. As we head into the final couple of minutes, I want to shift gears just a bit because this is just, as we talked about the beginning of the show, one piece of your work, the Baylor Religion Survey has become one of the more anticipated pieces of research that comes out regularly here at Baylor. I'd like to ask you both in closing, what's next for you both? What are some other projects that you're excited about as you look ahead to 2024 or beyond? Dr. Andersson, I'll start with you.

Matthew Andersson:
Sure. For me, it's a couple of things. I think my first stream of research that I'm most excited about is just building on this dignity book that I recently finished. I'm right now looking for ways to essentially extend our understanding of what influences people's dignity. I think most interesting for me on that front would have to be looking into how people engage in digital or social media based forms of interaction. I am looking at how people react to the content that they post online, because there's a table in my book where I actually show that there are sizable differences in dignity associated with whether people are negatively influenced by others' comments online. I think some of this might be picking up on what we're saying about cancel culture. I want to draw some connections there with some of the difficulties of just our life moving online, because that's something I don't think we talk about enough.
For me, the second stream of research that I'm excited about is getting back to how it is that social class matters in America. Basically, I study health inequality, and one of the main ways I approach that is I look at people's social class because that is important to health, even in an affluent society like ours, differences in social class matter because of relative rankings and access to resources and stress and other reasons. As I return to that topic, I'm trying to bring together different understandings of how to measure social class. Part of how social class matters seems to be whether people feel like they're looked down on for their financial position or not respected by others on the basis of not earning as much money or not attaining as high a level of education as someone else. That's in addition to any hardship they're facing financially or other factors that researchers talk about. Really revisiting social class and how it matters for health.

Derek Smith:
Outstanding. We'll look forward to that. What about you, Dr. Froese?

Paul Froese:
Yeah. One of the big themes in the sociology religion for the last few decades, has been secularization. We know that church attendance is declining, church affiliation is declining. Belief kind of is holding, but is maybe slightly declining. That is always an interesting topic. The Baylor Religion Surveys kind of tracked this trend over the last 20 years. For the next wave, what I'm interested in is there's this sense that, well, if people are supposedly secularizing, that they're becoming maybe more scientific in their worldviews, but my feeling is that actually people are becoming kind of more magical in their thinking. We see the rise of conspiracy theories. We see the rise of weird kind of health cures that aren't mandated by our medical professionals. That all suggests to me a kind of form of magical thinking that isn't like a secular scientific worldview.
One of the worries is that if you have people who are kind of unmoored from churches, so they're not kind of steeped in traditional theology and they're not very knowledgeable about science, magic becomes their world. They start to live in a magical world. That's kind of the topic I'm interested in pursuing this next wave.

Derek Smith:
Well, that's an interesting preview as we look ahead and we can be looking forward to that. I appreciate you both taking the time to share today. We'll have to talk to you again about some of these other topics as well. Appreciate you jumping on and this work on time disorientation. Hopefully people check that out and maybe learn more about what they're feeling in their own lives. Thanks for your time today.

Paul Froese:
Cool. Thanks Derek.

Matthew Andersson:
Thank you. Thanks, Derek.

Derek Smith:
Great to have you both on Dr. Paul Froese, professor of sociology and director of the Baylor Religion Surveys and Matthew Andersson, associate professor of sociology, our guests today on Baylor Connections. I'm Derek Smith. A reminder, you can hear this in other programs online, connections.web.baylor.edu, and you can subscribe to the program on iTunes. Thanks for joining us here on Baylor Connections.