Caroline Roberts, a methodologist at the University of Lausanne and project leader of STRATUS. | KA
The amount of free time available varies across social groups, and this has significant implications for health, work, and relationships with family and loved ones. In Switzerland, due to a lack of data, these issues have never been studied in detail. The national STRATUS project (social stratification of time) will address this. Led by the LIVES Centre and FORS, it will begin in September 2026. As part of the Swiss Household Panel, it will produce detailed data on how people use their time. Interview with Caroline Roberts, a methodologist at the University of Lausanne, who is leading the component that will produce this data.
En bref
- STRATUS (social stratification of time) is the largest time-use survey ever conducted in Switzerland. Led by the LIVES Centre and FORS, it will begin in September 2026 and run for four years.
- Due to a lack of sufficiently detailed data, time use remains a little-studied topic in Switzerland, whilst other European countries have been documenting it for years.
- Leisure time is not distributed equally across social groups or by gender, and this has an impact on health, work and relationships with loved ones.
- Participants in the Swiss Household Panel will keep a detailed diary of their daily activities.
- The project will comprise six components: the first will generate the data, whilst the other five will analyse it. The research topics are: lack of time and the quality of leisure activities, sleep, the division of labour within couples, time spent with children, and leisure activities for older people.
You are launching a survey on a scale never before seen in Switzerland. What insights will it provide?
For the first time, we will be able to observe in detail how people use their time. We know that the amount of free time available varies across social groups, and that this has significant implications for health, work, and relationships with family and loved ones. Until now, we simply did not have the data needed to study these issues in detail in the Swiss context.
Does this data not exist?
It does exist, but not in a format suitable for social science research. The Federal Statistical Office (FSO), for example, asks "how many hours you spent on different types of activities last week"; we know that this type of question is not very reliable. We lack granular time-use diaries that document every moment of the day, including activities, locations, the people present and the associated level of well-being.
Elsewhere in Europe, such surveys have been in place for a long time. What has Switzerland been missing?
In Europe, harmonised time-use surveys are coordinated by Eurostat and carried out by national statistical offices. But Europe does not fund them: it is up to each country to find the money.
What purpose do they serve in the countries that carry them out?
Above all, they allow for much more granular analyses of inequalities between different social groups. They also provide data for more specific indicators relating to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, particularly those relating to gender equality: how much time women and men spend on paid and unpaid work, childcare and household chores. Each country must produce these statistics to demonstrate its progress towards development.
How did this project come about?
It arose from a collaborative programme between the LIVES Centre and FORS, within our faculty: colleagues on both sides realised that this data was lacking in Switzerland. I was already working, for my part, on the methodological challenges of digital data collection. LIVES funded our preparatory work on two occasions, thanks to seed money grants, and its director, Daniel Oesch, was keen to launch a major project led by the centre. The two initiatives came together.
In practical terms, how do you measure someone’s use of time?
We rely on the Swiss Household Panel, which tracks a representative sample of the population over time. We will ask a new group of panel participants to record all their activities throughout the day in an app, which makes it possible to build a detailed picture of their entire day.
What is the timetable?
Just four years – the maximum duration for an SNSF project with six components. Our project will generate the data over the first two years, which will then be analysed by the teams and made available to other researchers alongside data from the Swiss Household Panel. In the meantime, we will work with existing data from the FSO and from other European countries.
And what are these other teams looking for?
The first component focuses on ‘time poverty’ (a lack of time) and on the structure and quality of leisure time. The second on the duration and quality of sleep. The third on inequalities within couples: who takes on the lion’s share of paid work, who handles household chores, childcare and care for adults. The fourth on the time parents spend with their children. The final aspect concerns the leisure activities of older people.
‘Time poverty’: that’s a strong phrase…
We have economic indicators of poverty; we can develop similar ones for time, and compare people on that basis. But the reverse is also true: an excess of free time isn’t good either: when you’re unemployed, you have too much time on your hands, and that can have negative effects. I work with sociologists who believe that these inequalities systematically affect the same groups: those on low incomes, those with low levels of education, migrants, women and older people. They will look for the intersections.
Your data will be comparable with that from other countries. Why is this crucial?
We will follow the specifications used by national statistical offices, and our logs will be included in the MTUS (Multinational Time Use Study), an international archive hosted at University College London, to which Switzerland had previously been unable to contribute. This is a relatively new field and there is a lack of data: even European surveys are not conducted every year. When it comes to sleep, the results are contradictory, and it is unclear whether the problem lies with the data or with the countries themselves. The more we can compare, the better science progresses.
Who will benefit from this data, apart from researchers?
It will be made available for public use: there is nothing to prevent various organisations, such as the FSO, from making use of it. Some cities are already considering the role of time in their transport policies. If it takes you forty minutes to get to work, that is a cost, and it weighs more heavily on some people than on others.
Inteview by Kalina Anguelova
How can you ask someone to recount their day without wearing them out? Since 2023, researchers from the LIVES Centre and FORS have been testing digital alternatives to the pen-and-paper diary, which is filled in by hand and then coded activity by activity.
The pilot project carried out a large-scale comparison of two state-of-the-art tools. MOTUS, developed at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, allows participants to record their activities throughout the day, either on a smartphone or via a web browser. ELiDDI, designed at the Centre for Time Use Research at University College London, is integrated into an online survey and offers a click-and-drag interface to reconstruct the day retrospectively.
Response rates, drop-outs, and the number and type of activities recorded: no one had yet measured the impact of these technical choices on time measurement. The findings will guide future online surveys, both in Switzerland and elsewhere.