Securing the Centre for Time Use Research

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

The CTUR is the world-leading specialist in collecting and analysing nationally representative samples of time diaries. It has pioneered a unique post-field-work harmonised cross-national data base (the Multinational Time Use Study MTUS). It produces original sociological, economic and other research (at first in the fields of gender relations, parenting and national accounting, more recently in public health, transport, and environmental assessment). It provides resources and support for academics, National Statistics Institutes and other public and private users. The current CTUR funding comes to an end in September 2019; new ESRC funding provides for the group until April 2021. This legacy application has two objectives: continuing CTUR resource provision for a period of 54 months from October 2019 (the end of the current ESRC Centre designation), and ensuring that our expertise in time use data collection and analysis is properly carried forward.Our proposed legacy program is designed to secure the essence of the ESRC's investment, in the harmonised MTUS dataset, in the accumulating expertise in time-use data collection methods, and in the data-analytic skills that underlie our work in discovering, and communicating, new applications for time-use methods. We identify three requirements for legacy funding to achieve this:1. Support for an annual programme of workshops, on time-use data-collection and data analytic methods, intended both for postgraduate and post-doctoral researchers as well as for members of NSIs. We also anticipate that there will be increasing demand from professionals in other new applications of time-diary data-in public health, environmental sustainability, and transport applications-will be attracted to this programme2. Support also for a continuation for our visitor programme, consisting of extended attachments to CTUR of academic, commercial or public sector secondees, for periods ranging between one month and one year, which allow for more extensive knowledge exchange, and lead both to the incorporation of new techniques and processes within the seconding institutions, and also update and increase CTUR's own knowledge of user issues and requirements.3. Funding for some staff to support and underpin the workshop and visitor programme as well as maintaining the viability of the time-use database, the associated meta-data documentation, and the data download, record-keeping and data-access control mechanisms. Small-scale legacy fund support for very-part-time directorial, managerial and technical staffing inputs is required to provide the co-ordination, organisation and motivational glue for CTUR's data maintenance, knowledge exchange and dissemination activities. We have already secured separate funding for the next two years of MTUS data acquisition and maintenance activity, as part of the work-programme of a new ESRC responsive mode grant to CTUR ("New Frontiers for Time Use Research"). We also have, from July 2019, three further years of annual NIH grants agreed (NIH contracts are, however, only issued annually). And we will be seeking new funding, either from Wellcome or a cross-Research Council group (ESRC plus MRC), primarily supporting the augmented diary plus motion sensor research on a nationally representative scale which will also provide longer term support for MTUS development.