New Frontiers for Time Use Research (NFTUR)

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Everything we do, takes time. So time spent in the various activities of daily life, provides a comprehensive and exhaustive basis for summarising the activities of a society. Yet people in general do not know how much time they devote to their daily activities (readers consider, for example, how many hours spent in their job, or doing housework, or asleep, last week.) For this reason, we have to adopt a special research technique. Rather than asking a set of direct questions "how much time did you spend in this or that activity", we instead ask people to list, in sequence, all the things they have done, with, as precisely as they are able to recall, the start and end times of each successive activity, from 4am yesterday to 4am today. The Centre for Time Use Research (CTUR) has experimented by comparing "day-diaries" of this sort with worn camera records (The CAPTURE24 project described in the Case for Support) and has demonstrated that, though uncertainty about precise start times introduces a random error, the diary technique produces overall estimates of time devoted to the various broad classes of activity (paid work, household chores, childcare, travel, media use, social and solitary leisure, sleep) which are virtually identical to the total durations estimated from the camera records. The CTUR is the world-leading specialist in collecting and analysing nationally representative samples of time diaries, from both adults and children. It produces highly original sociological, economic, and other research (for example in the fields of public health, transport, environmental sustainability) with the results of its time use analysis. It is building up a unique, historical database, with UK surveys from every decade since the 1950s, and from 25 other countries from across the developed world (the Multinational Time Use Study-MTUS) comprising a total of more than a million-and-a-quarter diary-days so farTime diary surveys are important for:1 The measurement of economic activity in the broadest sense. National statistical offices use time diary studies for both detailed evaluations of labour inputs to National Accounts, and also for National Accounts "Extensions" covering subsistence production and unpaid work in private households. The diary studies reveal gender- and household-type-related differences in work time use, and changes in these through the life-course.2 Processes of formation of "embodied capital". How people spend their time has consequences for the accumulation of skills, in the workplace, in work at home, and in leisure pursuits. People engaging in activities, learn skills that improve their ability to participate in those activities, whether in work (where effective participation increases efficiency, leading to higher pay or promotion in the context of employment, more free time in an unpaid work context)-or to more enjoyment (as the individual becomes a more skilled consumer) in a leisure context. Differences in the relative durations in these activities-eg related to paid vs unpaid work-lead to systematic inequality, particularly to gender wage gaps.3 Public health issues. The distribution of activity (physical exercise, sedentary behaviour, sleep) across populations is now seen as quite as important as nutrition in the determination of populations' health status. Time-use diaries provide better evidence for research in this area than questionnaire-based estimates of activity patterns.4 Affect and wellbeing. An appropriate work-life balance is now emerging as a key determinant of wellbeing. So life-satisfaction and population happiness studies now take time-use methods as a key resource for improvement of the measurement of national well-being.This proposal intends to improve and extend the MTUS datasets required for these four fields, as well as undertaking experiments with new data collection methods, and investigating innovative applications of time-diary datasets,