CTUR £6 Million Research Grants

The Centre for Time Use Research has won two major research grants. The European Research Council (ERC) has awarded an ‘Advanced Grant’ of €2.5 million which will pay staff salaries and supports research into historical changes in work and leisure, and social stratification and inequality in the distribution of time. The diaries also provide evidence of whether or not the population’s enjoyment of daily activities changes in parallel with, or contrary to, GNP. The UK Economic and Social Research Council £3.7 million grant supports a major new UK time use diary study, the first for more than a decade, and further development of CTUR’s international comparative work. CTUR is collaborating with the BHF Health Promotion Research Group - Oxford University’s Nuffield Department of Population Health, its Centre for Sleep and Circadian Neuroscience and its Centre for the Environment, to answer questions such as these. These new grants compliment funding from the US National Institutes of Health, consolidate the Centre’s position as the leading international source of expertise in the analysis, collection and distribution of large scale time use data. Behind the historical changes and cross-national contrasts in social and economic structure and behaviour, lie differences in how individuals and populations spend the 1440 minutes of their days. CTUR’s collection shows how all the disparate activities of the day fit together, both in the lives of individuals, and across whole societies. The attached press release offers more detail.