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The Day Reconstruction Method (DRM) assesses how people spend their time and how they experience the various activities and settings of their lives, combining features of time-budget measurement and experience sampling. Participants systematically reconstruct their activities and experiences of the preceding day with procedures designed to reduce recall biases. The DRM's utility is shown by documenting close correspondences between the DRM reports of 909 employed women and established results from experience sampling. An analysis of the hedonic treadmill shows the DRM's potential for well-being research.
How do people experience the settings and activities of their lives? How do they use their time? These questions are usefully considered together, but there is no generally accepted method for collecting the relevant data. Quantitative information about time use and the frequency and intensity of stress, enjoyment, and other affective states is potentially useful to medical researchers for assessing the burden of different illnesses (1) and the health consequences of stress (2); to epidemiologists interested in social and environmental Stressors (3); to economists and policy researchers for evaluating policies and for valuing nonmarket activities (4, 5); and to anyone who wishes to measure the well-being of society. In particular, economic models that define well-being by the temporal integral of momentary experienced utility (6-8) require detailed measures of the quality and duration of people's experiences in daily life.
Information about the allocation of time in the daily life of the population is a component of national statistics in several countries. With rare exceptions (4, 9), time-budget studies have not included measures of the satisfaction people derive from their activities. Similarly, questions about time-use and about the subjective experience of specific situations are rarely included in surveys of subjective well-being. Instead, these studies usually rely on global reports of happiness or satisfaction with life in general, or with domains such as work and family (10, 11).
The development of the experience sampling method (ESM) (12) and of ecological momentary assessment, which encompasses all momentary phenomena including physiological events (13), marked a notable advance in the measurement of the quality of people's lives. Participants in ESM studies are prompted to record where they are, what they are doing, and how they feel several times throughout the day. This technique provides a...