The authors measure the digital impact of the Indian COVID-19 lockdown using an online survey coupled with consensually provided browser history records from over 1,000 individuals, spanning over 30 million website visits. Browser histories provide the authors with rich and objective historical time-use information that they collected without access to the extensive in-depth and in-person questioning, involving multiple time windows (e.g., past day/week/month), typically required for verification and validation in time-use surveys, while also avoiding the measurement problems of recall bias and misreporting in subjective reports.
G²LM|LIC Policy Brief No. 59