The light diary

The light diary is light in the sense of a greatly reduced response burden. The aim is to have a self-complete or interviewer-administered instrument that can be completed in few minutes. Typically, light diaries use a less than 40 pre-coded activities listed in the rows and the 24 hours of the day divided into columns of 15-minute (or more) intervals. Activity duration is registered as straight across the time-interval fields, yielding the timing (start and finish times) as well the duration of an episode of that pre-coded activity. The light diary also captures the sequence of activities. Information that is not available via standard stylised questions. At its barest extremes, the instrument only collects primary/main activities and no context information but provides a classic ‘time-budget’ of how time is allocated to these main activities within the constraint of the finite 24 hours in a day. Some applications have allowed respondents to record a second, simultaneous activity, which curiously seems to eliminate some of the time respondents hesitate in registering their activity, and also collect some limited context information. Many features developed for light diaries have influenced the design of lower-burden digital instruments, which a sometimes called ‘hybrid light diaries’, like CaDDi/EiLLiDi system (discussed in Chapter 11) and the International Labour Organization (ILO) Labour Force Module under development.