For the general social survey program, yes, we want to do more frequent surveys. In the program itself, we have seven themes, and we cycle the themes. In certain years, we have the themes overlap within a five-year cycle. This is only for the purpose of the competing demands for the different content of each cycle.
For the unpaid worker segment, that theme, a lot of the estimates come from the time you survey, but we also have another cycle called caregiving and receiving that will give us a little more about the dynamics of caregiving and receiving. We have a cycle called family dynamics that looks at the relationship within the family, fertility, intentions and whatnot. We also have a survey called giving, volunteering and participation that also measures another aspect of unpaid work. We combine to holistically look at the unpaid economy. We need to look at the relevant cycles of that aspect.
I agree with you that time use, and we use time use a lot to measure the unpaid work, is not an easy survey, because it's diary based and it imposes a lot of response burden on our respondents. For us, can we do it? I think we can, but at the same time, we also need to balance response burden and how much we ask our Canadians to respond to in our survey.
To answer your questions about the impact of COVID, do we have information about the impact of COVID? The general social survey is a regular program at Statistics Canada, but during the initial stage of the lockdown, StatsCan really mobilized to put in other alternate collection mechanisms and platforms like the crowd-sourced survey and the web panel, so we measured the direct impact of COVID. We have more targets in terms of the questions on the impact of COVID whereas, for the general social survey, because we want to measure how social conditions change over time, we have to maintain certain consistency in terms of the content from the previous cycle.
Thank you.