Introducing the American Heritage Time Use Study Data Extract Builder (AHTUS-X)

Patterns of daily activities situated in the context of the location, time of day, presence of others and emotional experiences which time diaries collect offer essential data enabling us to understand what factors drive long-term trends in behaviour, and to predict how policies might encourage desirable shifts in behaviour while avoiding simultaneous change that might undermine policy aims. As daily life offers an essential dimension to a vast range of research topics, time use surveys offer better value for money than most surveys considering the potential uses for the money expended on data collection. To achieve this value for money, however, researchers need to use the data. Even now, few universities offer training in the analysis of time use data. Making access to customised data subsets ready for analysis quickly matters to the success and continued expansion of this field. The IPUMS Time Use data extract builder suite is one tool delivering essential data resources to time use researchers. This timepiece details the release of the latest project in this collection of archives, the American Heritage Time Use Study Data Extract Builder (AHTUS-X).

Background

Time use researchers at the Maryland Population Research Center and Minnesota Population Center, with funding from the National Institutes of Health and the United States Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service, developed the extract system alongside the early years of the American Time Use Survey, funded and managed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and collected by the United States Census Bureau. The ATUS is the first large-scale continuous national time use study. The ATUS is a ninth wave extension of a subsample of the longitudinal Current Population Survey (CPS). The initial project – the American Time Use Survey Data Extract Builder (ATUS-X) – aimed to ease the use of the complex combination of CPS and ATUS files. An earlier time piece in the eIJTUR (Hofferth, Flood, and Fisher 2012) details the extension of the ATUS-X, and outlined plans to expand this project into a suite of archives also covering historical time use data from the USA and harmonised international collections of time use data. The development of the new dimensions involves collaboration with the Centre for Time Use Research at the University of Oxford. The Minnesota Population Center Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) houses the IPUMS Time Use data extract builder archives.

The logical first companion resource to join the ATUS-X is the American Heritage Time Use Study (AHTUS-X). The ATUS builds on a long history of time diary data collection in the USA, which dates back to the early part of the 19th century (Kneeland 1929, Sorokin and Berger 1939). The first large scale national sample time use survey in the USA accompanied the 1965–66 US contribution to the Multinational Time Budget Research Project, the first input-harmonised comparative time use survey involving twelve mostly European countries (Godbey and Robinson 1997). Combinations of academic and national government agencies have collected at least one large scale national time use survey every decade since (Fisher and Gershuny 2015).

In 2003, Yale University secured funding from the Glaser Progress Foundation to construct a harmonised archive of national USA time use surveys as a part of a wider Program on Non-Market Accounts project. Yale University commissioned the Centre for Time Use Research, then based in the Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of Essex in the United Kingdom, to create this archive. The resulting American Heritage Time Use Study includes three files with cross-time harmonised variables for each survey:

• □a collection of person and household demographic variables
• □a summary files where each row represents the account of one person’s day and total time spent in various activities appears in each column, and
• □an episode file, where each row represents a change in at least one dimension of each participating diarist’s day.

Later grants from the NIH and British Economic and Social Research Council facilitated the extension of the AHTUS to cover surveys not included in the original project. The AHTUS episode files informed the development of the episode file of the Multinational Time Use Study (Fisher and Gershuny 2013). Elements of the MTUS will be released as a new IPUMS Time Use archive in 2016.

The Centre for Time Use Research independently releases a set of the three harmonised files for each survey included in the AHTUS. Users combine surveys sets as required and delete or ignore variables they do not need. The new AHTUS-X draws on a database of all AHTUS survey cases and variables, speeding the process of accessing the cases users require for research.

Surveys Included in the AHTUS-X Archive

The datasets currently harmonised in the AHTUS-X (Fisher and Gershuny 2015) include:

• □1965–1966 - Multinational Comparative Time-Budget Research Project, including a Jackson, Michigan and a national USA sample, conducted by the Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan and the Social Relations Department at Harvard University, with funding from the National Science Foundation (part of the Szalai Multinational Time Budget Research Project).
• □1975–1976 – American’s Use of Time: Time Use in Economic and Social Accounts, a panel study designed and administered by the Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan with funding from the National Science Foundation and the US Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.
• □1985 - American’s Use of Time, administered by the Survey Research Center, University of Michigan, with funding from the National Science Foundation and ATT, designed to compare the impact of self-completion mail-back, telephone interviewing, and face-to-face interviewing diary collection.
• □1992–1994 - National Human Activity Pattern Survey (NHAPS), administered by the Survey Research Center at the University of Maryland for the Environmental Protection Agency to produce data on exposure to environmental pollutants. This survey collected diaries from people of all ages, but did not ask marital status or income.
• □1994–1995 - National Time-Diary Study (NHAPS extension), administered by the Survey Research Center at the University of Maryland on commission for the Environmental Protection Agency to produce data on exposure to environmental pollutants. This survey collected an adult-only supplement as the original survey had only a single activity code for computing; however, this extension includes marital status and household income.
• □1998–2001 - This data set combines two small-scale surveys collected by the University of Maryland Survey Research Center, the 1998–99 Family Interaction, Social Capital, and Trends in Time Use Study (FISCT), a small-scale contiguous state sample funded by the National Science Foundation, and the 1999–2001 National Survey of Parents (NSP), funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
• □2003–2014 - American Time Use Survey (ATUS) conducted by the United States Census Bureau and funded and co-ordinated by the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, which collected diaries from a sub-sample of the population that had just completed the last of eight waves of the Current Population Study.

Developments and Future Plans in the AHTUS and AHTUS-X

Some small improvements are entering the AHTUS original files, distributed on the Centre for Time Use Research website (http://www.timeuse.org/ahtus) and the AHTUS-X website (www.ahtusdata.org) simultaneously in 2016. These improvements involve breaking the current sport and exercise code into four codes:

• □team sports and training
• □dancing
• □equestrian sports
• □other sports activities;

The AHTUS additionally will include some new codes which make the multi-purpose nature of some activities (for instance travel related to job searches) more evident than at present.

CTUR has recovered 1920s and 1930s USDA paper diaries, and longer-term will be adding these to the AHTUS and AHTUS-X. The 2006 Princeton Affect and Time Survey (PATS), modelled on the ATUS, in which Daniel Kahneman and Allan Krueger trialled the emotion questions now collected in the ATUS well-being modules, will be added in the not too distant future.

How Does the AHTUS-X Differ from the ATUS-X

Current users of the ATUS-X will find a familiar layout in this new resource, with additional features. While the ATUS only collected one diary from one person in sampled households, and only collected limited ranges of secondary activity, other USA surveys collected more than one time diary from multiple household members, and many surveys encouraged more detailed reporting of secondary activities. The sample selection process in the ATUS-X swiftly guides users through the range of surveys including each feature, facilitating construction of appropriate extracts accordingly.

Use Enables Reuse

As with all archives, continued funding for this project depends on people using the resource. If you have an interest in time use patterns in the USA, you both access essential data and contribute to the long-term preservation of this collection of documented historical change by visiting and making extracts from www.ahtusdata.org.