Conventional and Land-Time budget analysis of rural villages in Hubei province, China

Five rural villages in Qianjiang County (Hubei province), PR China, were in vestigated to collect information on the socioeconomic characteristics rele vant to farming system analysis. In each village, 50 households were random ly 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 a vailability and profiles of land use, time allocation and profiles of worki ng time use, cash flows, and degree of food self-sufficiency. Then we chang e focus by characterizing household types rather than village types. This i s done analyzing the same raw data aggregated at the household level to ill ustrate the difference of a parallel readings at different hierarchical lev els. Finally, we present a new approach to organize the information gathered in the conventional way into "typologies" referring to both household and vill age level. Such a passage makes possible a multidimensional reading of the system. One key concept of this analysis is the land-time budget (LTB) appr oach, which is first explained in theoretical terms and then illustrated wi th examples applied to our data set.