Sleep duration has figured into claims of two trends promoted recently as dysfunctional in the mass media. One is the observation that the population at large is sleeping less than before. The second is that the annual change from Standard Time to Daylight Savings (or summer) Time causes adverse effects, largely through the loss of an hour's…

Time-use analyses typically report the duration and frequency of pursuing specific types of activity. But how people evaluate what they report doing is not necessarily evident without additional, complementary forms of data. There are many alternative approaches to the measurement of subjective aspects of daily time-use, ranging from short term…

This review essay offers an institutional critique of the Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi Report. The notion of human capabilities and functionings advocated by the Report demonstrates an inspirational perspective to monitor human progress in quality of life (QoL). Several measurements the Report suggested remain inadequate. The personal diary techniques…

Asking clients to document their perceived quality of life during and after intervention is a popular approach employed by helping professionals to evaluate intervention programs. In the Project Positive Adolescent Training through Holistic Social Programmes (P.A.T.H.S.), students participating in the Experimental Implementation Phase and Full…

Flexible working hours are typically seen to be advantageous to working parents, as the flexible hours more easily allow responsibilities of care and employment be balanced. But do flexible work hours actually mean that parents can spend more time with their children? This article explores this for parents of young children in Australia. The…

Married women continue to spend more time doing housework than men and economic resources influence women's housework more strongly than men's. To explain this, gender theorists point to how gender figures into identities, family interactions, and societal norms and opportunity structures. The extent of this configuration varies culturally and, in…

This paper discusses the advantages and challenges of using qualitative methods to elicit poor children's perspectives about threats and positive influences on their wellbeing. It draws on research carried out by the author on the subjective experiences of poor children in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia in terms of their understandings of…

This paper explores the historical change in the work-leisure balance using time-diary evidence. Much of the recent discussion of this balance in the developed world has focused on paid work alone. What follows takes a different approach, considering the balance of "all" work time (paid plus unpaid) against leisure time and observes a tendency…

This article compares stylised (questionnaire-based) estimates and diary-based estimates of housework time collected from the same respondents. Data come from the Home On-line Study (1999-2001), a British national household survey that contains both types of estimates (sample size = 632 men and 666 women). It shows that the gap between the two…

We present evidence from a new comprehensive database of harmonized national time-diary data that standardizes information on almost 40 years of daily life in America. The advantages of the diary method over other ways of calculating how time is spent are reviewed, along with its ability to generate more reliable and accurate measures of…

Little attention in the quality-of-life literature has been paid to data on the daily activity patterns of happy and less happy people. Using ratings-scale information from time-diary studies, this article examines the hypothesis that people who describe themselves as happier engage in certain activities more than those who describe themselves as…

Time-use information is preferably obtained from diaries, as this method is considered more reliable than information from questionnaires. Data from the Danish Time Use Survey 2001 thus indicate differences in the level of unpaid work, whereas only minor differences appear for paid work. That is: people reporting many hours of paid work tend to…