Abstract
The NHK Japanese Time Use Survey has been conducted every five years since 1960 with the purpose of grasping daily activities of the Japanese from a viewpoint of the time spent on these activities. The regular NHK Japanese Time Use Survey employs a method where possible everyday activities are classified into 28 activity categories, which are shown on a time-use diary sheet, and respondents are asked to draw a line through relevant boxes to indicate the activity they were engaged in for each 15-minute slot. Preceding studies, however, have pointed out the difficulty in remembering and/or recording fragmented activities as one of the challenges facing the survey. In response to this, we conducted an agile survey in 2018—the 2018 Time Use Survey on Media Use—, whose focus was to capture fragmented media activities, and experimentally introduced a new method that asks respondents to enter an “x” mark, instead of a conventional line, for each under-ten-minute, short-time activity.
We compared “doers’ ratios” (defined as the percentage of total respondents who engaged in a given activity during a given day) by with or without “x.” It is found people spent a short amount of time (under ten minutes) on certain media activities, notably on “smartphone/mobile phone,” as well as on “personal chores” and “meals” among basic daily activity categories, and“x” marks were entered for them. Given that the regular NHK Japanese Time Use Survey needs to ensure the time-series comparability of the survey data and that its activity categories include many basic daily activities whose doers’ ratios showed little difference when compared by with or without “x;” currently we have no plans to introduce “x” marks in the regular survey series in the future, but using “x” marks may serve its purpose in the agile survey dedicated to capturing fragmented media activities such as smartphones.
