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Insights

Research, insights, impact: that is where hbits stands for. And you can read more on our blog. Because sharing insights, is increasing the impact.

7 April 2022

TUS & HBS within the IESS agreement

The main responsibility of Eurostat is to provide reliable and comparable statistical information to the institutions of the European Union (EU). An important instrument to achieve this is through the promotion of – as far as possible – harmonised statistical methods across its member states. Within this view the European Statistical System (ESS) is gradually being built up. Whereas Member States are responsible for the collection of the data and the compiling of the statistics for National and EU knowledge building, it is the role of Eurostat to support the…

Joeri MinnenRead more
25 March 2022

Time and health: growing older healthily

Within the framework of the Sense of Life and Retirement workshop at Howest College in Bruges, Theun Pieter van Tienoven gave a guest lecture on healthy ageing. He stressed the importance of time research to measure (the consequences of) active participation of people over 65. Growing older goes hand in hand with changing or disappearing social roles. Parenthood changes when children leave home or have children themselves. At retirement, the social context of work largely disappears. The risk of social exclusion increases. Active participation, such as informal help, voluntary work…

Joeri MinnenRead more
4 January 2022

GeoService: Inclusion of geolocation data as tentative data to MOTUS

In a Time Use Survey (TUS) respondents are asked to keep a record of their activities in a time diary, usually for 2 days (one weekday, one weekend day). Besides the activities themselves, their context also plays an important role. In a TUS, the activity and its social and spatial dimension define an episode. If one of the elements changes, a new episode starts. TUS is a reliable method to capture micro-behavioural data on how people spend their time. People time spending is however determined by constraints which makes that…

Joeri MinnenRead more
7 October 2021

Federal planning bureau tests MOTUS in view of better mobility data

In 2017, the Federal Planning Bureau called for the creation of a Mobility Data Working Group. The objective of this working group is the collection and processing of mobility data, as well as the coordination of various policy levels and domains. Today, detailed and up-to-date information is needed for themes such as salary cars and the organisation of public transport. Answering current policy questions poses new challenges for policy officers. Both collecting new data is a necessity, but also understanding the underlying dynamics why people move around is necessary. Movements…

Joeri MinnenRead more
16 September 2021

Difference between Committed and Tentative data

With the new User Interface of MOTUS the concepts of Committed Data and Tentative Data became important. Committed Data are seen as data that are registered by the respondent as there is an active involvement. Eg. When a respondent keeps a Time Diary this means the registration of an activity and the answering of additional context questions. Tentative Data are data about or in relation to the respondent without his or her active involvement, ie. passively. The data is gathered via sensors available in a Smartphone or Wearable, but the…

Joeri MinnenRead more
16 June 2021

What is the GSBPM?

The GSBPM stands for the 'Generic Business Process Model' and is used both within and between statistical offices and is used to describe the statistics production in a general and process-oriented way. MOTUS has been inventoried on the GSBPM.

Joeri MinnenRead more
1 June 2021

An new Data Protection Policy for hbits

Data protection laws require a Data Protection Policy (DPP) to be completed to assess proposed measures that pose particular risks relating to how personal data is used. It is essential that each person, client, employee, supplier or other persons and/or organization that comes in contact with hbits has an oversight of the scope of the projects and researches that run within hbits. Our updated DPP describes the minimum standards of how personal data must be processed, collected, handled and stored to meet hbits data protection standards. This DPP incorporates the content for a Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA),…

Joeri MinnenRead more
8 October 2020

COVID19 and gender equality at work

Webinar Institute for Gender Equality of Woman and Men On 8 October, the Institute for Gender Equality of woman and men organised the webinar “Covid-19 and gender equality of the work floor: challenges and approach”. Men and women are much more at home than before, but that does not necessarily mean that the division of labour between men and women has become more equal. The time women and men spend on paid work has hardly changed and the time men spend on domestic work is also unchanged compared to 2013…

Joeri MinnenRead more
2 May 2020

Social impact of COVID19

How does the coronavirus affect daily life? In many countries, strict measures have been taken to slow down the spread of the coronavirus. Many of these measures are expected to affect our daily lives significantly. We aim to find out how exactly. Go to https://www.everydaylife.eu and take part.

Joeri MinnenRead more
3 March 2020

CANCELLED – Workshop ‘Social Surveys Innovation’

The Source TM-project is being presented during the Workshop held on the 18th of March 2020 in Luxembourg.

Joeri MinnenRead more
25 February 2020

Fact-checker

Fact-checking by Oxfam and Knack Of all the work done by Belgian women, 56 percent is unpaid. It’s about cleaning, cooking, taking care of the children, doing the dishes, and so on. For men, 36 percent of the working time is unpaid,’ said Maaike Vanmeerhaeghe in response to the Oxfam report ‘Time to care’. The figure comes from the Global Gender Gap Report of the World Economic Forum, which in turn used the ‘Harmonised European Time Survey for Belgium’. In her ‘Factchecker’ section, Knack checked whether this is indeed true…

Joeri MinnenRead more
5 February 2020

What means Trusted Smart Statistics

Literature? There is not so much information to be found in literature about the meaning of ‘Smart Surveys’ and ‘Trusted Surveys’. Therefore we need to define both terms. Smart surveys Smart surveys are those surveys where respondents are asked to use Smart devices to complete a survey. Smart devices are Smartphones, tablets or wearables. ‘To complete’ a survey means: fill in a survey, or provide data via relevant sensors or via existing datasets The first option is an active participation, the second a rather passive participation. For both options an…

Joeri MinnenRead more
4 October 2019

The four W's

The four W’s Monday is show-and-tell day in Kindergarten of the primary school in Sydney that my oldest child attends, but instead of just blathering about what happened in their weekends, the preschool children are taught to present their adventures in a structured way. To do so, they follow the principle of the four W’s. The four W’s represent four questions that the children should address in order to provide a comprehensive story of their weekend experiences. These four questions are: What did you do? Where did you go? When…

Theun van TienovenRead more
14 September 2019

Time and health

Studies reveal that using time-diary data to measure physical activity matches the results of using devices or validated questionnaires.

Theun van TienovenRead more
18 August 2018

Daily routine

Shaping daily life There is an ongoing sociological debate whether daily behaviour is determined by social structures (e.g. temporal norms) or by individuals (e.g. when fulfilling their needs). Probably, the truth lies somewhere in between. On the one hand, temporal rhythms structure our society, as there are shop opening hours, working times, school times, mealtimes, bedtimes, and so on. This is the temporal context. On the other hand, individuals have different social roles (e.g. employee, parent, friend), that tomen with different responsibilities. These are individual needs. Daily life gets shaped…

Theun van TienovenRead more
14 May 2018

Big Data is only of interest if it has context

Manageable by reduction More than 90% of all available data was generated in recent years. This relates to the traces that we leave behind when we go online. Via Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and others – as well as through our surfing and viewing habits, purchasing behaviour, use of media, travel details and so on. So how does this stream of data become manageable? Datamining and mathematical algorithms reduce the data to movements and forms of behaviour that apply to a large group of people. There are applications in various areas:…

Joeri MinnenRead more
23 April 2018

Ionic software improves the app and makes it more stylish

New framework, new design Mobile apps are gradually becoming the norm. Developing these apps requires a high-quality framework. So we turned to Ionic for the new Motus app. Why? Ionic is an HTML5 framework built on Google’s AngularJS platform. The previous MOTUS app was based on Cordava and Phonegap. Excellent software, but not very flexible for the app. Now, with the qualities of Ionic under the bonnet, we have also upgraded the design of the app. Faster, better, easier At the same time we have also tackled some of the…

Joeri MinnenRead more
14 January 2018

Women bring up the children

The end of the gender revolution? The gender revolution appears to be stagnating. That was the conclusion of previous analyses based on Belgian time use data conducted from 1999 and 2005. But with new data from 2013 now available, the question again was: how (un)stable are gender stereotypes in everyday life? The research was conducted by Theun Pieter van Tienoven, a partner at hbits. He was commissioned to carry out the work by the Institute for the Equality of Women and Men and in conjunction with the Statistics Belgium division…

Joeri MinnenRead more

hbits - Home

TUS & HBS within the IESS agreement

Time and health: growing older healthily

GeoService: Inclusion of geolocation data as tentative data to MOTUS

Federal planning bureau tests MOTUS in view of better mobility data

Difference between Committed and Tentative data

What is the GSBPM?

An new Data Protection Policy for hbits

COVID19 and gender equality at work

Social impact of COVID19

CANCELLED – Workshop ‘Social Surveys Innovation’

Fact-checker

What means Trusted Smart Statistics

The four W's

Time and health

Daily routine

Big Data is only of interest if it has context

Ionic software improves the app and makes it more stylish

Women bring up the children

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