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 their duration.

Time-use diaries have their origins in studies of time use undertaken in response to the rise of industrialization at the end of the nineteenth century. Most of the pre–World War II time-use diary studies originated in the Soviet Union, Western Europe (including Britain), the United States, and Japan. Time-use diary studies have been increasingly adopted since the mid-1960s, when the landmark Multinational Time Use Study was conducted in 12 countries, helping to raise awareness of the possibilities of time-use diaries (Szalai 1972). Large-scale time-use diary surveys with nationally representative samples are still most common in the industrialized countries, in North America, Europe (both Western and Eastern), Japan, and Korea. In many of these countries, nationally representative time-use diary studies are collected at regular intervals (every five or ten years or so). Increasingly, time-use diary surveys are also being undertaken in developing countries.

In the time-use diary, respondents usually record their daily activities on a sequential basis onto pre-coded diary spreadsheets in units of time varying from ten minutes to a half hour. The diary spreadsheet is traditionally paper based, like a booklet, but increasingly, diary spreadsheets are available to respondents on computers. The idea is that respondents will record their activities if not exactly contemporaneously then at least during the same day, thus avoiding the recall bias involved in asking people to remember how much time they spent on a particular activity the previous day or the previous week. In addition to the [Page 1457]diary itself, basic socioeconomic and demographic information is collected from respondents about themselves and their families; indeed, many diaries are used as attachments to large-scale social survey instruments that provide a large amount of additional information about respondents and their households. The many different types of diary that have been used over the history of the methodology may be broadly classified into “light” and “heavy” types. Light diaries are characteristically single-day diaries that involve recording only a single precoded main activity for each unit of time. Their advantage is that they are cheaper, quicker, and, when properly administered, can yield high response rates. Heavy diaries, on the other hand, may involve the recording of both main and secondary activities over several days or even a week. They may also include additional information, such as the social context of activities (whether anyone else was present during that activity), the location of activities, and even the subjective state of the respondent while he or she was doing those activities. Heavy diaries, therefore, yield much more useful information but are more burdensome for the respondent, leading generally to lower response rates. Medium-heavy diaries completed by several members of the same family contribute the most useful information for research, since they allow the calculation, for example, of what proportion of the overall household domestic work each spouse contributes, how much time partners and children spend together in leisure activities, and how much they enjoy those activities.

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