Time allocation studies: a methodological studies

Time allocation studies (TAS) are invaluable for carefully documenting what people actually do and for how long, providing detailed data for comparisons between communities and between woman and men. TAS not only lays out time expenditure, but by doing so indicats something about people's preferences and constraints in use of time. Such detail is expensive, but useful where assumptions about women's and men's use of time need to be challenged with quantitative data. Using a method based on random observations, the Tropsoils-Indonesia Project in Sitiung collected data that made visible women's and men's interest in home gardens and directed research attention to this area of crop production.