Finding Time: Studying the Concepts of Time Used in Daily Life

Abstract

Time is a fundamental dimension of human experience, but its study presents special challenges, including the methodological problems of how to get people to talk about time and how to recognize discourse and actions that reveal cultural conceptions of time. In addition to classic ethnographic approaches that related conceptions of time to social organization, the growing concern over time-space compression in the study of globalization adds an additional set of concerns in the social scientific study of time. Through recounting some of the author’s own mistakes and efforts at studying time in Trinidad, this article makes suggestions for how to ethnographically approach the topic of time in order to understand the connections between cognition, cultural conceptions of time, social organization, and the relationship of global influences and local actions.

About time: An integrative approach to effective environmental policy

“…However, conceptions of time and time preferences present unique challenges for ethnographic research (Birth, 2004): walking up to someone and directly asking ''What are your cultural ideas of time?'' is likely to confuse more than illuminate.…”

The future orientation of foresters: An exploratory research among Dutch foresters into the prerequisite for strategic planning in forestry

“…The approach chosen in this study is the Circles Test of Cottle (1967Cottle ( , 1976. It is a projective approach which involves participants by drawing circles of different sizes to symbolize past, present and future time, and arranging these circles in a pattern to represent the relationships between these time periods (used by for example Cottle, 1967Cottle, , 1976Koenig et al, 1981;Beiser et al, 1989;Bruno and Maguire, 1993;Harre and Schmidt, 1995;Marko and Savickas, 1998;Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner, 1998;Thoms, 2003;Birth, 2004). Considerations for using this approach in this research were mainly that (1) it is an easily applicable and quick method allowing people to express how they view past, present and future time and how they perceive the relation between these time zones, both on the conscious and unconscious level and (2) it has shown to be a valid (Cottle, 1967(Cottle, , 1975(Cottle, , 1976Beiser 1987: 447;Bruno and Maguire, 1993: 424-425;Bruno, 1995: 113) and reliable method, yielding relatively stable time perceptions (Brown and Herring, 1998: 594).…”

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“…Pascal (1989); Elías (1988); Ranum (1990) y Perrot (2011. 58 Véanse, entre otros muchos, Sauter (2006);Bruegel (1995); Birth (2004) y Sanz de la Higuera (2010) y (2013b). Véanse igualmente los análisis de Elías (1989aElías ( ), (1989bElías ( ) y (1990 .…”