Time-Use Resources for National Statistics (TURNS)

Time-use diary (TUD) surveys collect detailed, continuous accounts of what people do throughout complete days. They ask respondents to list each successive episode through an entire day, describing the main activity, any other simultaneous activity, location, and presence of other people, as well as other characteristics such as whether the diarist was using a smartphone/computer. Samples of diarists, randomly selected across populations and across the days of the year, therefore provide nationally representative quantitative evidence of how the entire society spends its time. The Centre for Time Use Research (CTUR) has a leading international role in the design, collection and analysis of these materials.
TUD data provide crucial information on economic activity, population lifestyles, welfare and wellbeing:
1. They allow estimates of the extent not just of paid work but also of those sorts of unpaid and voluntary work, in households and community groups, that are not included in conventional measures of National Product (e.g. GNP).
2. Many TUD surveys also include measures of how diarists enjoy each activity, increasingly recognised as a direct measure of subjective wellbeing, and survey items on life satisfaction and overall happiness.
3. They provide detailed information about durations and rates of participation in sedentary activities, meals and snacking, physical exertion and sleep; behaviours which have important implications for both physical and psychological health.
4. They provide comprehensive daily evidence of the type and duration of activities, combined with their spatial location and who respondents were with at the time, permitting estimation of the behavioural transmission risk of infectious diseases.
5. Each daily activity also has a "footprint" of environmental impact on energy demand and the production of environmental pollutants, meaning that nationally representative diary studies are important inputs to modelling of global environmental change.
This proposal has two elements, one methodological and one substantive. Traditional 'pen and paper' TUD surveys are relatively burdensome for respondents, who are required to enter full details of daily sequences of (on average) 18 to 20 (but often more) different activities. On the methodological side, there is a developing need for survey collection methods that take full advantage of modern online and smartphone technologies. We are proposing an innovative experimental programme of data collection, testing the efficacy of various survey instrument designs deploying these technologies, and comparing them with the traditional instruments that are still employed in the Harmonised European Time Use Survey organised by the European Statistical Agency. We are collaborating actively with the UK Office of National Statistics, which is contributing data from its own pilot online time use diary survey, with the aim of contributing to a new programme of TUD data collection.
Collecting nationally representative TUDs provides a promising potential for the estimation of new social indicators. Gross National Product (GNP) is widely understood, among economists and others, as an incomplete basis for understanding population wellbeing, since wellbeing might, for example, actually decline as GNP grows, perhaps as a consequence of simultaneously increasing hours of paid or unpaid work. We will use the data we collect, alongside other existing surveys, in a programme of substantive research focusing on the development of a "dashboard" of new statistical indicators to complement GNP. These will include: indicators of levels of economic activity including the value of unpaid work; measures of population health risks (in relation to both chronic and infection disease); measures of subjective and objective wellbeing; and measures of the environmental impact of day-by-day activity; all estimated from the same TUD information base