Multiscopo ISTAT – Time Use (2008-2009)

The survey Time Use is part of an integrated system of social surveys – Multiscopo ISTAT. It’s an important observation instrument for understandin how people organize their daily life and the relations between the daily routine of the various family’s members. In fact, the main feature of this survey is that you can learn about the way in which each respondent allocates the 24 hours (divided into 144 intervals of 10 minutes) between the various daily activities, transfers, places visited and the people she has spent with. It is a question that has an extremely high level of detail, which is not comparable with the information obtained by the traditional questionnaires with fixed questions. Three types of files are available:

1. the individual file consists of a record for each individual component of the family. It contains a series of respondent’s general information, such as personal data, education, family networks, religious participation, the working environment and the use of leisure time.
2. the episodes file contains every episode that appears in the daily diary. An episode is a set of 10-minute intervals just alike for all detected information (type of main and secondary activity, place/transportation where it is carried out, persons present during the activity). If one of these information change, the episode changes too so, consequently, it can have a variable duration. The classification, at the most general level, includes the following activities:
   • self care;
   • work;
   • education, studying;
   • housekeeping and family care;
   • voluntary work, social and religious participation;
   • social life, enterteinment, vita sociale, divertimenti, cultural activities and rest;
   • sports and outdoor activities;
   • arts, hobbies, games;
   • mass media;
   • transfers and travels, special codes.

   Similarly locations where the activity takes place and transports used were classified. In the final part of the questionnaire are located a few questions about the individual’s state of health, how children and preteens spend their daily time and the degree of satisfaction with respect to their use of time.

3. the days of the week file consists of one record for each day of the week (seven records for each person who filled out the weekly diary), and describes the possible working time ranges performed on each day of the week.

In order to optimize the time of use of the dataset (exclusively distributed from ISTAT for not member users), UniData offers a service of convertion from ASCII format to the main statistical software format (SPSS, Stata, R or SAS). For detailed information visit the Services for Istat Data page.

Keywords: leisure time