Time budget methods for behavioral community psychology

Abstract

Obtaining reliable and cost-efficient data on everyday behavior occurring in community settings presents a formidable problem for behavioral community psychologists. This article (a) describes a set of methods, called time budgets, for recording sequences of everyday behaviors and their social and physical contexts; (b) discusses the quality of data yielded by these methods; and (c) illustrates their utility for behavioral community psychology. Time budgets meet important criteria for behavioral assessment in community settings by permitting direct assessments of ecobehavioral systems at various levels of social organization. Data from these methods can be used in diagnosing problems, planning interventions, and evaluating outcomes. An application of time budgets in research on the elderly is presented to illustrate one use of the method. Time budgets provide a dependable, flexible, and cost-efficient alternative to naturalistic observation for many assessment situations in behavioral community psychology.