Conventional and Land-Time Budget Analysis of Rural Villages in Hubei Province,China

Five rural villages in Qianjiang County (Hubei province), PR China, were investigated to collect information on the socioeconomic characteristics relevant to farming system analysis. In each village, 50 households were randomly sampled and household heads interviewed. We first present the results of this conventional survey, which describes these five villages in terms of conventional socioeconomic parameters such as demographic variables, land availability and profiles of land use, time allocation and profiles of working time use, cash flows, and degree of food self-sufficiency. Then we change focus by characterizing household types rather than village types. This is done analyzing the same raw data aggregated at the household level to illustrate the difference of a parallel readings at different hierarchical levels. Finally, we present a new approach to organize the information gathered in the conventional way into “typologies” referring to both household and village level. Such a passage makes possible a multidimensional reading of the system. One key concept of this analysis is the land-time budget (LTB) approach, which is first explained in theoretical terms and then illustrated with examples applied to our data set.