It is not widely recognised that diary-based surveys of time use contain data not only on ‘input’ time but also on ‘output’ time. The diaries record episodes of time use throughout the day showing activities that can be categorised not only as household production input time, such as...

Identifying patterns of activities in time diaries in order to understand the variety of daily life in terms of combinations of activities performed by individuals in different groups is of interest in time use research. So far, activity patterns have mostly been identified by visually...

This paper argues that public holidays facilitate the co-ordination of leisure time but do not constrain the annual amount of leisure. Public holidays therefore have benefits both in the utility of leisure on holidays and (by enabling people to maintain social contacts more easily) in increasing...

The article examines methodological and substantial problems faced by Canadian time use research. It assesses the gains and the limitations of this research from a historical and comparative perspectives.

Media and other accounts of life after retirement suggest it to be “The Golden Years” of life, when the elderly have true leisure in the classic sense of freedom from responsibilities of work. However, like earlier time-diary studies, data from the 2003-07 Americans Time Use Project (ATUS)...

Over the six-year period between 1997 and 2003 broad social changes occurred in the United States: welfare rules changed, the nation’s school policies were overhauled, America was attacked by terrorists, and American values shifted in a conservative direction. Changes in children’s time were...

Time budget studies differ in the number of diary days. The ‘Guidelines on Harmonized European Time-Use Surveys (HETUS)’ issued by EUROSTAT recommend a two-day diary with both one weekday and one weekend day. In this contribution we examine whether the number of diary days has an effect on...

This paper explores the relationship between marriage arrangements and daily activities of young married women, using detailed time-use data from an adolescent study in rural Bangladesh. Measures of marriage arrangement are payment of dowry and the relative wealth status of natal and marital...

Measures of childcare drawn from time-diary data are commonly based on the specific childcare activities a parent engages in throughout the day. This emphasis on activities has been criticised as it ignores the large quantity of time parents spend supervising their children. In order to provide...

This is an attempt to answer a question about how changes in the time use and in health the population relate to each other, what connection exists between duration and character of work and the state of health. The paper draws on the data from two rounds of time budget surveys of: 1) families...