Abstract
The authors have developed a social indicator, called Lambda, that has as its base the manner in which individuals allocate their time among various life activities. This indicator does not suffer from the usual demand characteristics and experimenter bias associated with most subjective social indicators, i.e., those based on question-naires. It is not a single rate indicator in the sense of suicide rate. Lambda is a weighted sum social indicator with both subjective and objective aspects. The weights are decided by the population under consideration and not by the investigators or some other outside agents. The elements to be summed are the frequency functions for the discrepancies that arise when individuals state the amount of time they would like to spend in an activitiy versus the amount of time they actually spend at the activity. There are frequency functions for each activity. The properties of this indicator are discussed in detail.
A pilot study comparing Lambda to another social indicator and some demographic variables was conducted with 1012 undergraduate students. The results of the pilot study show a high correlation between Lambda and the other social indicator. The results are presented. Lambda is currently being used by the Gallup organization.
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Hobson, R., Mann, S.H. A social indicator based on time allocation. Social Indicators Research 1, 439–457 (1975). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00353063
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00353063