The 55th UN Statistical Commission has endorsed the new Guide to Producing Statistics on Time Use, providing national statistical offices (NSOs) and policymakers with recommendations and best practices for collecting, processing, analysing, and disseminating time-use statistics to inform policies, including those related to unpaid work, non-market production, well-being, and gender equality.
Prepared by the UN Statistical Division (UNDS), this guide is the result of the work of the Expert Group on Innovative and Effective Ways to Collect Time Use Statistics (EG-TUS), which brings together specialised data-producing agencies and national statistical offices (NSOs). As an active member of the EG-TUS, UNICEF contributed to the production of the guide.
As a result of this contribution, the guide features a section on the new MICS module on time use, which was developed and field-tested in various settings before being rolled out in MICS7 in 2023.
While most data collection efforts focus on measuring the time use of the adult population, this module specifically targets children and adolescents between 10 and 17 years old. This is an important step, as the lack of standardised data collection instruments to measure children's time use hinders the ability to understand how it affects their well-being and shapes their opportunities. To address this, the MICS time use module captures the types and durations of all activities children and adolescents engage in, serving as the first standardised tool for use in a multi-topic household survey, which will yield comparable data across countries.
Mongolia is the first country to have completed the collection of children’s time-use data in MICS. In addition to exploring how patterns of time use differ by age and sex, Mongolia will be able to assess how these patterns correlate with outcomes of well-being in health, education and multi-dimensional poverty, among others. The MICS time-use data will help inform public policies across a range of sectors and complements routine dedicated time-use surveys in the country.
Find details about the Time Use diary on our tools page.