Factors affecting work-time allocation among physiotherapists. A multiple classification analysis

As part of a time budget study among 149 physiotherapists in Västerbotten County, northern Sweden, a Multiple Classification Analysis was completed. The aims were to evaluate the relative importance of some factors for the allocation of working hours, and to devise comparable measures of the ability of the particular set of variables to account for the variations in time utilisation. Occupational area was the most important factor in explaining the distribution of working hours, when the other factors were kept constant. Time utilisation was slightly affected by professional post and sex, but not by working hours. The explained variance, R2, was 0.37 for patient treatment and 0.30 for transport, indicating a fair degree of explained variance in these models. The R2 coefficients for the other tasks were low, indicating that factors, not included in the study, were more important in explaining the allocation of working hours for those tasks.