Title: Enhancing and Enriching Historical Census Microdata
Funder: Economic and Social Research Council

Abstract: Daily events - driving to work, cinema visits, playing with children - are the atoms of social life. The life-course of each individual in any society consists of a sequence of such events, partially reiterated over daily, weekly, seasonal and annual cycles. Specific elements of these sequences accumulate into individual biographical characteristics: a history of continuous job participation increases "human capital" (expected future wage), frequent visits to the theatre or concert call accumulate as cultural capital and so on. And in turn, these individual characteristics aggregate to form key societal variables such as employment levels, rates of cultural participation, quantities of household production and voluntary care provision. Time, unlike money, is an appropriate unit of account for leisure and unpaid work as well as paid. So random samples of event sequences represent all the time devoted to all of a society's activities. Time Use Diary Surveys (TUDSs), collecting activity sequences from random samples, therefore, provide a more comprehensive and consistent view of socio-economic circumstances than emerge, either from the money-related phenomena which predominate in conventional economic statistics, or from sociologists use of disjointed questionnaire measures of work-related behaviour and domestic and leisure practices or participation in cultural and sporting events. TUDSs have an unusually wide range of current or potential applications: * Establishing relationship between conventional National Product and non-monetary output * Identifying the impact of labour market exclusion on leisure, voluntary, other unpaid work * Identifying short duration trips (underestimated in the National Travel Survey) * Measuring (changes in) the domestic division of labour * Estimating extent of sociability, co-presence and care activities * Estimating personal physical activity levels in relation to medical/public health objectives * Registering exposure to environmental risk or strain from people's daily activity * Measurement of subjective well being and instantaneous or "objective" utility The resource collection and enhancement activities proposed here will contribute substantially to historical and cross-national comparative research in each of these areas. The UK has a substantial historical collection of full-scale TUDSs covering the period 1961-2001, but unlike most other developed countries, has no recent time diary survey. The new large UK time diary survey proposed here for 2014, not only updates the sequence of UK studies but, conforming to the standard Harmonized European Time Use Survey protocol, enables straightforward and detailed comparisons with more than a dozen other recent European time diary surveys, as well as comparisons with the much larger (20 country, 40 year, 60 survey) Multinational Time Use Study (MTUS), which is maintained by the Centre for Time Use Research (CTUR) and will also be extended as a result of this proposal. The proposal also includes: * the development of a new diary-based measure of enjoyment of activities, together with improved questionnaire measures of longer-term rates of participation in infrequent activities (exercise, sports, cultural events), and collecting these, both for an experimental sub-sample of the new UK diary study, and, in simplified form, as a module to be fielded as part of internet panel studies in 8 European countries. * combining diaries with accelerometer body camera, and household equipment energy meters, in experimental samples, so as to validate and calibrate associations of activity measure with energy use and energy demand. * improving and extending the historical and geographical range of the MTUS, and attaching additional calibrated measures. * improving documentation and other researcher support on the CTUR website, and providing workshops and other training materials for time use data collection and analysis.


Research activity codes: 1.2 PSYCHOLOGICAL AND SOCIOECONOMIC PROCESSES;1.4 METHODOLOGIES AND MEASUREMENTS
Health categories: GENERIC HEALTH RELEVANCE