Daily activities and self-reported stress during COVID-19 lockdown. Havana, 2020

COVID-19 has impacted people's use of time, which can be studied through the temporal distribution and sequential order of diaries. The research question was: is it possible to design and validate a survey to collect sequences of daily activities and analyze their relationship with stress during COVID-19 lockdown? Therefore, the research aimed at validating the Survey of Activity Diaries and Self-Reported Stress (EDiActEs, in Spanish) in Havana, August 2020. To achieve this, the EDiActEs was designed, its content validity, piloting, application, reliability and analysis of its capacity to find the regularities wanted in the data were carried out. The study was exploratory, quantitative and longitudinal panel-type. Sociodemographic information, activity diaries, self-reported stress and level of rest upon awakening were collected. The diary included the place and with whom the activities were performed. A total of 202 people recruited by snowball sampling, during lockdown, participated. A nomenclature of activities and their coding procedure were tested. An 80% consensus was reached among five experts on the relevance of the items. The self-stress scale obtained a low reliability. The hours devoted to sleep, leisure, study, personal needs, work, commuting and household activities were determined. A sequence analysis showed regularities in the diaries. Three clusters of activity sequences were obtained: on-site work, vacation/work break and work at home/teleworking. The survey can be applied in different contexts to investigate the sequential structure of the diaries.