Department of Earth and Planetary Science, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
Institut de Ciència i Tecnologia Ambientals (ICTA-UAB), Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Cerdanyola del Vallès, Barcelona, Spain.
PLoS One. 2022 Jul 14;17(7):e0270583. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0270583. eCollection 2022.
Time use studies quantify what people do, over particular time intervals. The results of these studies have illuminated diverse and important aspects of societies and economies, from populations around the world. Yet, these efforts have advanced in a fragmented manner, using non-standardized descriptions (lexicons) of time use that often require researchers to make arbitrary designations among non-exclusive categories, and are not easily translated between disciplines. Here we propose a new approach, assembling multiple dimensions of time use to construct what we call the human chronome, as a means to provide novel interdisciplinary perspectives on fundamental aspects of human behaviour and experience. The approach is enabled by parallel lexicons, each of which aims for low ambiguity by focusing on a single coherent categorical dimension, and which can then be combined to provide a multi-dimensional characterization. Each lexicon should follow a single, consistent theoretical orientation, ensure exhaustiveness and exclusivity, and minimize ambiguity arising from temporal and social aggregation. As a pragmatic first step towards this goal, we describe the development of the Motivating- Outcome- Oriented General Activity Lexicon (MOOGAL). The MOOGAL is theoretically oriented towards the outcomes of activities, is applicable to any human from hunter-gatherers to modern urbanites, and deliberately focuses on the physical outcomes which motivate the undertaking of activities to reduce ambiguity from social aggregation. We illustrate the utility of the MOOGAL by comparing it with existing economic, sociological and anthropological lexicons, showing that it exhaustively covers the previously-defined activities with low ambiguity, and apply it to time use and economic data from two countries. Our results support the feasibility of using generalized lexicons to incorporate diverse observational constraints on time use, thereby providing a rich interdisciplinary perspective on the human system that is particularly relevant to the current period of rapid social, technological and environmental change.
时间使用研究定量描述了人们在特定时间间隔内所做的事情。这些研究的结果揭示了来自世界各地的社会和经济的多样化和重要方面。然而，这些努力是以零散的方式推进的，使用的是时间使用的非标准化描述（词汇），这些词汇通常要求研究人员在非排他性类别之间进行任意指定，并且在不同学科之间不易翻译。在这里，我们提出了一种新的方法，即综合时间使用的多个维度来构建我们所谓的人类生物钟，作为提供关于人类行为和经验基本方面的新跨学科视角的一种手段。该方法由并行词汇表支持，每个词汇表都旨在通过专注于单一连贯的类别维度来实现低歧义，并可以组合起来提供多维描述。每个词汇表都应遵循单一、一致的理论方向，确保详尽性和排他性，并最大限度地减少由于时间和社会聚合而产生的歧义。作为实现这一目标的务实第一步，我们描述了动机导向的结果导向通用活动词汇表（MOOGAL）的开发。MOOGAL 从活动的结果出发，适用于从狩猎采集者到现代城市居民的任何人类，并故意关注激发活动的物理结果，以减少社会聚合的歧义。我们通过将 MOOGAL 与现有的经济、社会学和人类学词汇表进行比较来说明其效用，结果表明，它以低歧义详尽地涵盖了之前定义的活动，并将其应用于来自两个国家的时间使用和经济数据。我们的结果支持使用通用词汇表来整合对时间使用的各种观察约束的可行性，从而为人类系统提供了丰富的跨学科视角，特别是对于当前快速的社会、技术和环境变化时期。
