[Air-l] Statistics Canada - General Social Survey: The Internet and the way we spend our time

[Ben Anderson]

On 3 Aug 2006, at 09:44, <E.J.Helsper at lse.ac.uk>  
<E.J.Helsper at lse.ac.uk> wrote:
> Does anyone know if there have been extensive comparative studies  
> on the effects of different methodologies to measure internet or  
> media use? What are the differences when you use interviews,  
> diaries, or a survey?

Jonathan Gershuny's papers in IT & Society and also Social Forces  
deal with this to an extent. His more general work covers comparisons  
of time use estimates from surveys vs diaries over all topic domains  
(not just ICT use).

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=gershuny+time+use

John Robinson (Maryland) has also been active in this area for a long  
time.

As part of a project we are currently undertaking here Paul Stoneman  
has written a working paper on some of these issues - including new  
analysis of the same longitudinal time use diary data as Gershuny but  
with different stats models and thus some different results.

see http://www.essex.ac.uk/chimera/projects/esoctu/

He's also currently writing a new paper where he tests a number of  
different stats models on the same data to see if the results differ.  
And why. And what this means for 'interpretation' :-)

If you're in Copenhagen later this month for the IATUR 2006  
conference (http://www.sfi.dk/sw26297.asp) you'll get a preview.

Ben


----
Dr Ben Anderson
Deputy Director, Chimera, University of Essex
+44 (0) 7710 187 806
http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~benander