Thank you.
It's an interesting question, and the response was mentioned earlier. You need more than one source of information to really get a handle on these things. I'm a very visual person, and something springs to mind that Australia did when it was looking at unpaid work and time-use surveys the first time. One of the really neat things about the general social survey is that it really allows you to see very specific patterns in women's and men's time that are different.
This visual chart for Australia showed that men's time is in big blocks. You spend a long weekend doing home repairs, and that's done. Then you spend the next five days at work. Women's patterns are like this coloured mosaic all over the place. You do a few minutes of this and a few minutes of that; you do things in combination. That's fascinating to know, but the amount really matters too. The kind of thing you get in the census is complementary to that, so you get a sense of the volume and who's doing what.
In the study I'm looking at and working on, I found it fascinating that there are some women who should be retired but look like they are doing full-time, long hours of child care. I also know from the census that family structure among immigrants to Canada is very different, especially among immigrants who are living in poverty. It's very different from the Canadian average. So combining those things you get a sense of that population.
Maybe they are elderly women who have come to Canada recently who don't qualify for old age pensions and therefore need to do this child care work. Maybe they're supporting their children, who are very stressed from lack of child care and trying to meet all the demands, so the grandparents are assuming that. There is such a richness there if you combine these different sources.