Alternative and Innovative Time Use Research Concepts

Abstract

The ability to “orient activity to time structures and to plan and allocate time as well as to fill in time with specific activities” represents a key challenge in people's lives in modern societies. Questions relating to how people spend their time have hitherto mainly been investigated by “traditional” time use research or time budget research. This method is a useful and indispensable tool in time use research. However, the approach usually aggregates individual time budgets and therefore provides few benefits in terms of analysing the question of how individuals spend their time. This paper explains how German leisure research has recognised the time budget approach's lack of suitability for answering such questions and has, over the past few years, stepped up its efforts to develop new and innovative time use research methods and concepts.

Keywords:

• time use research
• methods
• temporal patterns
• individual time use