The Centre for Time Use Research (CTUR) working paper on Times use diary design for our times: General principles for online design is now available. The paper presents a multi-field digital time-use diary design matching the information collected in best practice pen-and-paper designs such as the Harmonised European Time Use Survey (HETUS).  

The online design developed at CTUR mimics the ‘light diary’ visual presentation, including all the fields and activities of the HETUS diary.  Methodological work to date suggests that this visually intuitive design does not lead to an erosion of data quality or increased respondent burden. 

An introductory time use data workshop, focusing on what time use research is and how to handle time use data (using Stata) in a fun and interactive setting, are now available.

Time use data offer a unique way to investigate issues of social life, paid work patterns, work-life balance, family, gender, and wellbeing, through instantaneous enjoyment.

The workshop will include the following: Introduction to time use research, familiarisation with time use literature, identification of creative ways to use time use data, hands-on data session using Stata, and time use variables and how to use them.

The Social Mobility Commission has now released the Childhood Origins of Social Mobility report. CTUR Research Fellow Elena Mylona contributed to the report by showing time spent in developmental childcare using CTUR's ELiDDI 2023 time use data.

The Centre for Longitudinal Studies (CLS) at the Social Research Institute, UCL Institute of Education is running a flagship free webinar on 28th November 2024 that gives first-time users an insight into four world-leading cohort studies and the wide range of opportunities they offer to researchers. 

The event is suitable for first-time users of the data and a range of different researchers including undergraduate and postgraduate students who are looking for data sources for dissertations and course work.

The event will cover studies that followed generations born between 1958 and 2002 and are a powerful resource for addressing a wide range of scientific questions in various social, economic, health, political and geographical sciences. The data are free to download from the UK Data Service.

We introduce the new Stata Package timeuse, which facilitates the manipulation of time use diary data. The main commands are timeuse, timeusex, sequence and sequencex.

The CTUR team presented at the 46th International Association for Time Use Research (IATUR) in Corfu, Greece on 6th to 10th October 2024. Professors Jonathan Gershuny and Oriel Sullivan, Senior Research Fellow Juana Lamote and Research Fellow Elena Mylona will be in attendance. The team also had the opportunity to attend amazing talks and network with fellow time use researchers.

A large part of all economic activity is invisible and unrecognised within conventional economic statistics. "Manifesting the Invisible Economy" summarises the central argument of Jonathan Gershuny's forthcoming book Time Work and Well-being.  

We are happy to announce that the data from our Extended Light Digitial Diary Instrument (ELiDDI) survey run with a UK nationally-representative sample, and compatible with the Harmonised European Time Use Survey activity classification,  is now ready for researchers to request.

• A national population-representative survey of individuals using the ELiDDI tool ran in April 2023. For this survey, the diary tool included full HETUS activity classifications and diary fields.
• It included an individual questionnaire and 2 randomly allocated diary days (one weekday and one weekend day). Phone completion by interviewer was offered to the ‘hard to reach’ population (10% of sample). 
• N= 3874 diary days were collected from a national population-representative sample of individuals.
• Data will soon be available to download from the UK Data Service, however, please feel free to enquire if you require an immediate copy (datasets are currently pending weight calculations). 

About the ELiDDI diary tool:

• The ELiDDI design mimics the visual intuitiveness and simplicity of the light diary design. 
• The online functionality of the ELiDDI design enables expansion of the light diary via dropdown menus to the full complexity of the HETUS diary, while maintaining the simple and intuitive light diary visuals.
• This makes it analogous both visually and in terms of functionality to the gold standard HETUS pen and paper design and maintains the built-in independence of diary fields.

Prof. Oriel Sullivan will be speaking at the workshop 'A Path to Inclusive Development: Unpacking Gender Inequalities in Economic Theory and Policies' organised by the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. The workshop is organized in loving memory of Professor Nilüfer Çağatay, a distinguished Professor of Economics at the University of Utah and a Research Associate with the Levy Economics Institute. 

Oriel will be presenting CTUR's multi-field digital time-use diary design, which matches the information collected in best practice pen-and-paper designs such as the Harmonised European Time Use Survey (HETUS). A multi-field design offers versatility, providing data for a wide-ranging and still growing corpus of substantive and policy applications.

The online design developed at CTUR mimics the ‘light diary’ visual presentation, including all the fields of the HETUS diary.

Read the abstract for Time use diary design for our times: the importance of multiple independent fields, using the example of child care

Professors Jonathan Gershuny and Oriel Sullivan presented at the launch of the new Economic Statistics Centre of Excellence (ESCoE) funded by the Office of National Statistics on 12th December 2022. They discussed their contribution to the project: "The ESCoE time-use programme: Time-use survey requirements for National Income accounting".

Presentation: Time use surveys for national accounting (2nd presentation, pages 21-38)

Our Senior Research Fellow Juana Lamote de Grignon Perez and colleagues write about how time use diaries offers offer the best options to study sleep data in the absence of nationally representative samples of objective measures. The analysis looks into the possible sleep deprivation epidemic.

CTUR has recently developed and run a Harmonised European Time Use Survey (HETUS)-compatible version of its ‘Click and Drag Diary Instrument’ (CaDDI) designed to demonstrate how drop-down menus can expand the activity categories of the original design to compatibility with the full HETUS classification of activities list.  In recognition of the visual similarity to the classic 'light' diary design, but with online-enabled extensions, we have renamed this new version the Extended Light Digital Diary Instrument (ELiDDI). For this version the basic 7-field design of the original CaDDI was retained, but the main and secondary lists of activity were expanded in drop-down menus to include over 100 activities, fully compatible with the 2018 HETUS Guidelines (minor changes were also made to the location field and transportation mode coding to ensure compatibility). While previous CaDDI datasets have been collected using quota-representative market research panel respondents, the new ELiDDI version has recently been successfully run using a UK nationally-representative sample, provided by NatCen Social Research.  The resulting data set is currently in preparation for deposit in the UK Data Archive. 

Our Research Fellow Elena Mylona, who led the research, analysed our 20/21 UK time use data collected using the CaDDI instrument, to see behavioural change over lockdown restrictions, and two intervening periods where restrictions were eased; allowing us to explore what impact, if any, lockdowns might have on the relationship between time use and wellbeing.

This research was conducted in partnership with the What Works Centre for Wellbeing, and was supported by the ESRC. 

CTUR are making accessible programmes in STATA to help researchers analyse two of our key surveys - the Multinational Time Use Study (MTUS) and Covid-19 time use data series. 

Using a unique representative online time use diary survey, we examine the UK population's behaviour both before, and at five key phases during, the COVID-19 pandemic. A main focus of our analysis is which of the significant changes in activities associated with the pandemic survived the government-defined end of most restrictions on `freedom day' (July 19th 2021). Our data (N7,000 diary days) includes a baseline pre-pandemic survey, conducted in 2016, followed by five subsequent waves coinciding with key moments of pandemic restrictions, including all three lockdowns and two periods of relaxation of restrictions between lockdowns and after the final lockdown.

Using the original CaDDI instrument we collected 5 waves of time use diary data across the pandemic period in the UK, including during 3 'lockdowns' and 2 periods of relaxation of restrictions, plus a 2016 baseline (data available from the UKDS core collection, study number 8741).  

Since then, inspired by the 'contact' diaries used for modelling purposes by epidemiologists, we have designed a version of the CaDDI which includes more information on crowding while doing particular activities, or in particular venues, and the age/sex and degree of contact with people respondents report as being 'with them' across their diary days.  The idea is to combine the detailed information on activities of the time use diary (as well as information on location and social interaction) with variables of interest in epidemiological studies in respect of crowding and social contact (as in the POLYMOD 'diary').

In 2016 CTUR developed an online time use diary; the Click and Drag Diary Instrument (CaDDI), collecting population-representative (quota sample) diary information from Dynata’s large international market research panel across 9 countries. We fielded the same instrument using the UK panel during the COVID-19 pandemic: in May-June 2020 during the first lockdown; in late August 2020 following the relaxation of social restrictions; in November 2020 during the second lockdown; in January 2021 during the third lockdown; and in August/September 2021 after the lifting of restrictions.  The data allows comparison of detailed accounts of population behaviour (activities, location and co-presence) across 3 lockdowns and 2 periods of the relaxation of restrictions.  The complete set of six surveys has now been harmonised and deposited with the UK Data Service archive.

A wide-ranging public debate surrounds how pandemic lockdown measures differentially
impacted individuals and which precise mechanisms – whether financial-, health-, or policydriven
– predominate in determining these effects. Using a nationally representative 24-hour
diary survey covering the first two years of the pandemic, we explore the mechanisms
underlying changes in well-being. We exploit the variation in the stringency of the social
restrictions implemented by the UK government during this period and use an event-study
methodology to net out the impact of social restrictions from other pandemic effects.

CTUR has been awarded a £1M grant from the ESRC for the project ‘Time Use Research for National Statistics (TURNS), grant reference: ES/V016644/1. The team will be deploying new technologies in the design of time use diary (TUD) surveys, which will contribute both to the development of a new continuous UK time use data collection strategy and to the construction of a consistent system of time-use based social indicators of population health, wealth and wellbeing. An innovative experimental programme for collecting TUD information through online, webapp-based, surveys will be used, and the TUD data collected will provide a new range of time-used based national-level economic and social indicators.

CTUR has just published an outreach audio book on the science communication channel, SciPod. It is based on their research paper, 'Using time use diaries to track changing behaviour across successive stages of Covid-19 social restrictions' published in PNAS.

Now including information on new survey data and links to publications in PNAS (‘Using time use diaries to track changing behavior across successive stages of COVID-19 social restrictions’) and PLOS ONE (‘A new perspective from time use research on the effects of lockdown on COVID-19 behavioral infection risk’).

Access our audio book on this on the Science communication channel SciPod

Read the press release by UCL Institute of Education, UCL

Read the publications in PNAS and PLOS ONE

We present analyses of 24-hour time use diary records of the UK populations activities, their social context and their location, collected in real time from four successive waves of representative UK samples, both before, and during, the current COVID-19 pandemic. We show changes in behavioral response to social restrictions at three time-points during the pandemic, including across two nationwide lockdowns.

Read the UCL Institute of Education announcement

Sleep, work, eat, leisure – at a high level most of us spend time on similar activities. But just how similar are the daily activities of people across the world? This is something worth considering, not just to serve our curiosity but because differences in the way we spend time give us meaningful perspectives on living conditions, economic opportunities and general well-being.

This study compares self-report diary records of specific days with objective records of the same day constructed from wearable camera and accelerometer evidence. Results strongly supports the use of diary methodology at both the aggregate (sample) and individual levels. It provides evidence that time-use data could be used to complement physical activity questionnaires for providing population-level estimates of physical activity. It also implies new opportunities for investigating techniques for calibrating metabolic equivalent of task (MET) attributions to daily activities using large-scale, population-representative time-use diary studies.    DOI: 10.1177/0081175019884591

How do you spend your time in a day? How many different activities do you do?

Publicity for Penguin and Major newspaper coverage which includes a list of media and academic reviews/appearances.

UKTUS, collected and managed by CTUR, formed the UK contribution to the Harmonised European Time Use Survey (submitted by the UK Office of National Statistics)

Annual Review of Sociology by: Benjamin Cornwell, Jonathan Gershuny, and Oriel Sullivan

Briefing Notes on Almudena Sevilla’s involvement with the Institute for Fiscal Studies survey on current Covid-related behaviour and policy issues. Link to piece on this in The Economist (paywall):

Using wearable technology to analyse daily travel behaviour written by Teresa Harms (UCL) Cate Pattison and Doina Olaru (UWA)