Making Ends Meet

YC Research, a nonprofit research lab based in Oakland, CA, and Stanford University are conducting a research study. One of the questions the research aims to answer is how money affects the ways people use their time.

The Making Ends Meet app is designed to help researchers understand the way people use time. It collects anonymized data that can help to infer participant time-use. The app occasionally prompts you, the participant, to answer surveys about how you have spent your time. Answering these questions can provide researchers with valuable qualitative data about time use.

To lower the burden of surveys on you, the app also uses passive data collection methods to infer time use. One example is location data captured via GPS. Knowing where someone spends their time can help determine how it was spent. This method reduces the number of surveys you have to fill out while preserving your privacy.

This app provides you with full control over the data you provide to the study. You can pause the app operation at any time to stop passive data collection or to skip particular surveys. You can access and review the data collected from your device through your online account. Also, at any time, you can choose to delete part or all of the data you have provided for the study or drop out of the study.

Continued use of GPS running in the background can dramatically decrease battery life.