About the Centre

Time use research has a long history in the works of both sociologists and economists. We can learn about people's everyday lives and how they respond to new socioeconomic difficulties by having scientifically grounded evidence of how they manage their time and allocate it to various activities. An understanding of the structure and quality of time use can be leveraged to develop robust assessments of people’s well-being across the world. These assessments can help provide recommendations for the development of social policy measures to enhance the population’s quality of life and labour market policies.

During the Soviet era, there was a strong scientific school in Russian sociology that focused on collecting and analysing empirical data in the field of time use with the most cutting-edge statistical and econometric techniques. However, after the 1990s, the progress of Russian research on this subject became incredibly fragmented, and the country started to fall behind other nations in this field. There was a lack of comprehensive scientific data regarding structure and use of time by the Russian population. In order to close this gap, the HSE Institute for Social Policy launched the Centre for Well-being and Time Use Research in January 2023 (Rector's Order no.6.18.1-01/291222-21 dated December 29, 2022). This centre is specifically dedicated to researching and producing empirical studies on time use in Russia.

The centre is an interdisciplinary research initiative, and the goal is to engage scholars from various fields, including sociologists, demographers, economists, psychologists, historians, anthropologists, and others, to conduct empirical research.

Functions of the centre:

•  Conducting empirical research on the population's time budget structure, especially in the context of global comparisons.
•  Establishment of a knowledge base and empirical data on crucial aspects of the public’s time use.
•  Development of methodological approaches to the analysis of people’s time budget structure.
•  Encouragement of scientific discussion and popularisation of knowledge regarding the composition of time use.