Time-use survey to reflect lifestyle changes over a decade

People often comment that time flies but tend to stop there without looking into why.

If they ever broke down all their daily activities by minute, they would get a clearer idea about how they spend their time. This is what Chinese researchers are now trying to find out on a bigger scale because changes in the use of time can also reflect changes in lifestyles of the Chinese people.

The National Bureau of Statistics launched a survey this month to get a glimpse into the day-to-day life of today’s Chinese. Researchers will compare new results with those from China’s previous, and first, time-use survey conducted in 2008.

In the 10 years since that survey, lifestyles, time allocation and quality of life have changed tremendously, so the second survey is necessary, according to the bureau. The ongoing survey will be based on a random sample of at least 60,000 people in about 20,000 urban and rural households in 10 provinciallevel regions such as Beijing and Heilongjiang, Sichuan, Zhejiang, Yunnan and Gansu provinces.

Respondents will be asked to document how many minutes they spend on daily activities like work, transportation and entertainment over 24 hours.

“Studying how people spend their time is actually to understand how people live their life,” said Zhang Zhongliang, head of the bureau’s department of social, science, technology and cultural statistics.

Time-use patterns can be different depending on people’s age, profession and where they live. For example, a mother may be disciplining her children (unpaid work) at 8 pm at home while the father is playing mobile games (entertainment), he said.

The survey can also reflect the changes of lifestyles and quality of life, and it is a useful tool to evaluate the improvement in social welfare and even gender equality over the years, Zhang said.

“For example, working hours can indicate productivity while the time people spend on entertainment can somehow reflect the sense of happiness,” he said.

According to the 2008 survey, the average time people spent on all forms of paid work in a seven-day week was 5 hours and 11 minutes while time spent on the internet amounted to an average of only about 14 minutes.

By comparing results from the two surveys, it becomes clear how Chinese society has evolved. People spent an average of 137 minutes a day reading newspapers or watching TV 10 years ago, but now people may spend even more time on a different kind of media — social media, Wang said.