Following the initial pilot of the app [click here] the app was revised and improved. The next phase of the project was to recruit 100-200 participants to complete the revised app. The revised app consisted of two stages: ‘set up’ and ‘data collection’. When participants first downloaded the app they used their work email address to authenticate their participation in the study (e.g. only participants with the correct email suffix were able to access the app). Importantly, this email address was not recorded by the app, instead a unique participant identifier was generated and then used for each survey completed, to enable linking of all surveys for each participant. Participants were prompted to complete the once-only demographic surveys on this first log in to the app. Participants were then asked to nominate three days over a two week period where they would be willing to record 30 minutes of their time use. The app then randomly allocated each participant a specific 30-minute time slot for each of their three nominated days. This random time allocation ensured coverage of the working day in 30-minute time slots, from 8am through to 4pm, Monday to Friday.
Once this set-up phase was complete the participant was sent a notification on their first nominated data collection day. Notifications were sent to participants’ mobile devices prior to each of the surveys and every 30 minutes until completion. The surveys had to be completed in order of: ‘Before School’ ‘30min Time Use’ , then ‘After School’. Notifications stopped at 7.30pm each night when participants were given the option to ‘opt-out’ of that day to allow for unexpected events but still had the option to contribute data on another day.
Participants
Participants for the piloting of the Teacher Time Use app were recruited from the Queensland Teachers’ Union’s (QTU) membership across Queensland. To gain a broad range of perspectives, the decision was made to recruit participants from Local Area Council meetings. Local Area Councils in the QTU are geographically grouped members and are located throughout the state, including in metropolitan and regional locations. This convenience sampling means that a) there was a higher number of participants working in regional schools and b) the commitment of these participants to represent the QTU may be evidence of particular views regarding work and workload not representative of all Queensland teachers. However, given the pilot nature of this study, it was felt that the location and commitments of these participants were appropriate to test the utility of the app.
138 participants were recruited via a series of presentations to Queensland Teacher Union (QTU) council meetings between 14th October and 19th November in Townsville, Mackay, Brisbane, Toowoomba, Sunshine Coast and the Gold Coast. Instructions were provided regarding how to download the app to an Apple or Android mobile device (such as an iPhone or tablet), and how to set the app up to record time use.
Results
We prepared a presentation for our research partners, the QTU, that addresses the key fundings from this pilot. This can be accessed below.
Time Use, Time Poverty QTU Description of app data for QTU Feb23