Time-Use Diaries

Time-use diaries are a means of collecting structured sequential information on the activities that people do throughout the day. Since many of these activities are themselves consumption activities (e.g., eating, shopping, going to the cinema), and since time itself is, in some accounts, regarded as an increasingly pressured consumption resource, time-use diaries have an important contribution to make to the study of consumer culture. Time-use diaries are considered to be a more reliable way of estimating the amount of time that people spend in different activities than are survey questions that ask the interviewees to retrospectively estimate this time. In addition, because the information is collected in the form of a diary, it is also possible to analyze sequences of activities as opposed simply to ...