TIME-USE OF WOMEN AND MEN IN IRELAND
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II THE IRISH NATIONAL TIME-USE SURVEY, 2005
The data which form the basis of this paper were collected between April
and July 2005 in a single-purpose, dedicated, nationally representative survey
carried out by the ESRI on behalf of the NDP Gender Equality Unit of the
Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform (McGinnity et al., 2005). As
this was a scoping study the target sample was small - 1,000 adults, 500 men
and 500 women.
To select a nationally representative random sample a two-staged
clustered design was adopted, based on the National Electoral Register as a
population frame. Interviewers attempted to recruit all persons aged 18 years
and over in each selected household (for details on sampling procedures see
McGinnity et al., 2005).4 Each adult was asked to complete a weekday and also
a weekend diary on two days specified by the interviewer.
The survey adopted a ‘light’ diary methodology. The ‘light’ diary contains a
relatively short but comprehensive list of pre-coded activity categories and
respondents are required to indicate which they were involved in for each
period of the day. The diary ran from 4.00 a.m. to 4.00 a.m. the following
morning broken down into 96, 15-minute blocks or “time slots”.5 In recording
activities the respondent was asked to tick (✓) a box for each 15-minute time
slot to indicate which of 26 activities he/she was engaged in throughout the
day. The activities are outlined in Table 2 below.
While few respondents reported activities not covered by the list, never-
theless, in common with all light time-use diaries, the categories do impose a
normative structure on people’s lives and require them to ‘fit their lives’ into
26 pre-defined categories. Respondents were permitted to record two activities
per time-slot in order to capture multiple simultaneous activities - ‘multi-
tasking’.6 Respondents were also asked to specify where they were and whom
they were with during each time period. The diaries were essentially filled
out on a self-completion basis following instruction from an interviewer.
Accordingly, the structure and content of the diary was relatively straight-
forward and was designed for self-completion by the respondent in the absence
4 To take account of this clustering of individuals within households, and potential time-use
correlations, the models in this paper were also run with robust standard errors. The results do
not differ from those presented.
5 15 minutes is a commonly used unit of time in time-use surveys and strikes a balance between
respondent burden and detail of response.
6 Previous research on time-use finds that people often combine activities. Certain types of
activity, eg. childcare, are more likely to be combined than others, so confining respondents to one
activity would underestimate such activities. Many recorded more than two simultaneous
activities, of which up to four were recorded (see McGinnity et al., 2005 for further details).