women" and finally "college women" and published a pioneering time use estimates of the economic value of US women's homemaking activity based on the USDA materials \[[@CR9]\].

The first major US academic study of the time use of both men and women, *(*which explicitly identified Kneeland's USDA work as the source of its methodology) was published by Lundberg and colleagues in 1934 \[[@CR12]\]. Their study of leisure in a suburban community, was followed by Sorokin and Berger's 1939 \[[@CR6]\] investigation of the activity patterns of young people. The first time-diary-type research in the United Kingdom (UK) was conducted by the left-leaning Mass Observation organisation in 1937 (more than 1000 of the original diaries survive to the present), closely followed by the BBC Department of Audience Research which conducted itsfirst "listener availability" study in 1938. This led to data collections estimating the daily habits of radio listeners, and later television viewers, and were used to guide appropriate programming and for assessing target market sizes for advertisers.

Robinson and Converse \[[@CR13]\] studied historical change in US time use. Time studies comparing societies with varying rates of television set ownership suggest that television has had a greater impact on time allocation than the so-called information technology revolution at the end of twentieth century. Television displaced equivalent time spent listening to radio and going to movies but had smaller effects on sleep, out-of-home socializing and reading, with minor effects on home chores and grooming \[[@CR14]\]. By the early 1960s large diary-based time use studies were underway in Czechoslovakia, France, Hungary, Poland,