2 Guidelines for Time Use Data Collection and Analysis Andrew S. Harvey
INTRODUCTION Time diaries provide an ideal approach to the collection of activity data. Activity data collected by means of stylized questions or activity lists, taken out of the context of daily life, miss many of the objective and subjective circumstances about participation in activities. Yet often these are the circumstances that, with personal characteristics, determine actual behavior. A time diary places activities in their natural temporal context. By its nature, the diary provides a record of all activities during a specified period (day, week), along with a potentially rich array of contextual information. This chapter explores the collection and analysis of diary data and specific opportunities and problems they pose for the researcher. As indicated in Chapter 1, even the simplest time use studies provide crucial measures of involvement in a broad range of activities engaged in by individuals—such as paid work, housework and child care, education, sleep, eating, socializing, games, sports, media use. If supplementary data are collected about the location of activities, and whom individuals are with, many more measures can be generated. These additional data pro-
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Andrew S. Harvey Department of Economics, St. Mary's University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada B3H 3C3. Time Use Research in the Social Sciences, edited by Wendy E. Pentland, Andrew S. Harvey, M. Powell Lawton, and Mary Ann McColl. Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, New York, 1999.
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