Collecting New Time Use Resources (CNTUR)

5de5bc4c-9409-436b-aec8-dcfe91422339

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ESRC
ESRC
ESRC
ESRC
ESRC

£938,980

March 31, 2019

April 1, 2020

Daily events - driving to work, cinema visits, playing with children - are the atoms of social life. The life-course of each individual in any society consists of a sequence of such events, partially reiterated over daily, weekly, seasonal and annual cycles. Specific elements of these sequences accumulate into individual biographical characteristics: a history of continuous job participation increases "human capital" (expected future wage), frequent visits to the theatre or concert call accumulate as cultural capital and so on. And in turn, these individual characteristics aggregate to form key societal variables such as employment levels, rates of cultural participation, quantities of household production and voluntary care provision.

Time, unlike money, is an appropriate unit of account for leisure and unpaid work as well as paid. So random samples of event sequences represent all the time devoted to all of a society's activities. Time Use Diary Surveys (TUDSs), collecting activity sequences from random samples, therefore, provide a more comprehensive and consistent view of socio-economic circumstances than emerge, either from the money-related phenomena which predominate in conventional economic statistics, or from sociologists use of disjointed questionnaire measures of work-related behaviour and domestic and leisure practices or participation in cultural and sporting events.

TUDSs have an unusually wide range of current or potential applications:
* Establishing relationship between conventional National Product and non-monetary output
* Identifying the impact of labour market exclusion on leisure, voluntary, other unpaid work
* Identifying short duration trips (underestimated in the National Travel Survey)
* Measuring (changes in) the domestic division of labour
* Estimating extent of sociability, co-presence and care activities
* Estimating personal physical activity levels in relation to medical/public health objectives
* Registering exposure to environmental risk or strain from people's daily activity
* Measurement of subjective well being and instantaneous or "objective" utility

The resource collection and enhancement activities proposed here will contribute substantially to historical and cross-national comparative research in each of these areas.

The UK has a substantial historical collection of full-scale TUDSs covering the period 1961-2001, but unlike most other developed countries, has no recent time diary survey. The new large UK time diary survey proposed here for 2014, not only updates the sequence of UK studies but, conforming to the standard Harmonized European Time Use Survey protocol, enables straightforward and detailed comparisons with more than a dozen other recent European time diary surveys, as well as comparisons with the much larger (20 country, 40 year, 60 survey) Multinational Time Use Study (MTUS), which is maintained by the Centre for Time Use Research (CTUR) and will also be extended as a result of this proposal.

The proposal also includes:

* the development of a new diary-based measure of enjoyment of activities, together with improved questionnaire measures of longer-term rates of participation in infrequent activities (exercise, sports, cultural events), and collecting these, both for an experimental sub-sample of the new UK diary study, and, in simplified form, as a module to be fielded as part of internet panel studies in 8 European countries.
* combining diaries with accelerometer body camera, and household equipment energy meters, in experimental samples, so as to validate and calibrate associations of activity measure with energy use and energy demand.
* improving and extending the historical and geographical range of the MTUS, and attaching additional calibrated measures.
* improving documentation and other researcher support on the CTUR website, and providing workshops and other training materials for time use data collection and analysis.

Potential Impact:
We identify four groups of stakeholders:

Academics:
(1) social scientists, mainly sociology and economics, and
(2) non-social-scientists, mainly health and environmental research.
These two groups will make extensive use of the datasets we produce, as well as other information on data collection and analysis from from our newsletter or website, from innovations developed in CTUR's substantive research, and from our training and visitor programs.

Non-academics:
(3) UK national and international government agencies, NGOs, voluntary agencies
(4) Journalists, voluntary and private sector groups using our work .
These groups will additionally make use of our press releases and contributions to digital social media, as well as deploying our staff in advisory committee memberships and in paid or unpaid consultancies.

Impact objectives vary by stakeholder group:

Capacity building: For stakeholder group 1 we will develop the understanding of the central role of time-use data, so as to increase rate of utilisation of our data and resources. Aims for non-social science researchers (group 2) involve focussing on direct collaborations to improve our understanding of areas where our own expertise in measurement and modelling is mainly instrumental to the core science, thus enhancing the synergies arising from multi-disciplinary approaches in academic research.

Conceptual impact: Impact objectives for journalists and private sector stakeholders (group 4) are: to raise awareness of time use data in general and particularly of the importance of substantive findings developed from this material for public policy; and to contribute to attempts to understand and influence behaviour and hence markets for goods and services.

Instrumental impact: For stakeholder group 3, impact emerges in the form contributions, as committee members or consultants, to administrative, planning and implementation processes of the various stakeholders. As example: we recently provided a week's consultancy to ONS on the use of diary studies to estimate childcare volumes, contributing to Extended National Accounts to be published by ONS during 2014.

The Data Archive registered (2001-12) around 350 downloads of time-use datasets per year. We estimate that that there may be something like 500-1000 researchers worldwide making use of the ONS 2000-1 study (see CTUR's website ). Moreover the general trend of growth in interest in this area of work implies in turn that the potential market for a UK 2014 study is likely to be larger (perhaps substantially larger) than this. While economics is the largest single discipline, sociology is not far behind. Psychology figures substantially within the "other social sciences" category. Business and public policy specialists account for around 15% of all users, and a roughly similar proportion come from the engineering and other natural sciences. We are not aware of any category of social survey that has a wider spread across the entire range of academic disciplines. And we have noted throughout this application the recent acceleration of interest in time diary materials from medical and public health, as well environmental impact modelling. A recent article in the American Journal of Epidemiology, for example described the MTUS as the only available source of reliable data on recent historical change in population sleep patterns. The MTUS has similar promise for cross-national comparative and historical research into sports participation, exercise and sedentary behaviour.