ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines the problems associated with measuring and using this type of data and describes the structure of the data from the Social Change in Economic Life Initiative (SCELI) survey. It describes the choices made in analysing the diary data derived from the SCELI survey. 'The myth' was a systematic misrepresentation of household practices by and to the family members themselves, which allowed arguments about who does or should do what to be disguised from the protagonists. Although diaries have been used before to obtain data on the domestic division of labour, the SCELI data set is unusual in that it has diaries from both the male and female respondents of the household for a full week. The diary data from the SCELI survey allows to construct measures of both task and time use for both respondents in the sample of 387 households.
