IPUMS Time Use

Posts related to IPUMS Time Use

OCC2010 is now available in ATUS

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By Daniel Backman

You asked, we delivered.

The American Time Use Survey (ATUS) was first fielded in 2003 and data have been collected and released annually since. Over that period, ATUS occupations have been coded using three distinct coding schemes. IPUMS ATUS users have requested that we extend our occupation harmonization work to IPUMS ATUS to bridge changes in occupation coding schemes. The wish of those users has been granted! OCC2010 is now available via IPUMS ATUS. As always, the original, un-recoded occupation categories are also available in OCC.

Why do we need to harmonize occupations?

The Census Bureau regularly updates occupation and industry codes to reflect the rapidly changing nature of employment in the United States. Changes to occupation codes are important because they provide the most up to date information about jobs and the nature of work. Updates to occupation codes reflect the evolution of jobs and work and allow for the incorporation of new occupations. While updating occupation classification schemes improves the quality of occupation data, navigating these changes can be cumbersome for researchers.

What is OCC2010?

OCC2010 is created by IPUMS to implement consistent occupation codes across all years of currently available ATUS data (2003 to 2024). This harmonized occupation variable assigns all original occupation codes in the ATUS (i.e., OCC) to a single Census Bureau coding scheme. We chose the 2010 occupation coding scheme (well, actually the 2012 coding scheme which is very similar to the 2010 scheme1) because then we only have to bridge one change in occupation codes forward in time and backwards in time. OCC2010 was developed to enhance the comparability of occupational data by providing a consistent set of occupational codes for IPUMS ATUS from 2003 forward. OCC2010 is also available in IPUMS CPS and IPUMS USA.

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2022 ATUS Eating and Health Module Data: New Variables and Updates

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By Annie Chen & Sarah Flood

The American Time Use Survey Eating and Health Module, funded by the Economic Research Service, asks a series of questions related to grocery shopping, food preparation, and nutrition. The most recent module was fielded in 2022 during the COVID-19 pandemic and was previously fielded in 2006 to 2008 and 2014 to 2016. The 2022 Eating and Health Module, set to be fielded again in 2023, asks new questions, asks similar questions in different ways than previously fielded modules, and contains additional variables of high interest to researchers.

New Variables in 2022

The 2022 ATUS Eating and Health Module asks a series of new questions related to exercise/physical activity, grocery shopping, meal preparation, and food quality. The food quality questions are especially interesting because they provide researchers with the opportunity to assess relationships between food quality and time use, which hasn’t been possible previously with these data. This is the first time that the ATUS has asked any information about respondents’ food intake on the ATUS diary day. The module is also responsive to changes in shopping behavior during the pandemic, specifically online grocery shopping and grocery delivery/pickup options. The shopping and meal preparation enjoyment questions might allow for comparisons to the ATUS Well-Being Module (fielded in 2010, 2012, 2013, and 2021).

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Preparing Time Diary Data to Create Tempograms and to Conduct Sequence Analysis

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By Sarah Flood and Kamila Kolpashnikova

Time diary data: a unique opportunity

Time diary data offer researchers an opportunity to visualize daily life in a way that just isn’t possible with other data and demonstrating how people spend time. Respondents report every activity that they engage in (along with where and who they were with) over the course of the day, which means that time diaries can indicate how much time was spent in various activities as well as when activities occur during the day (e.g., timing) and the order in which they occur (i.e., sequencing) . This blog post will describe how to transform IPUMS ATUS data to perform these types of analyses, illustrate how to create a tempogram (including sample code), and link to additional resources for creating tempograms and performing sequence analysis.

While there are several ways to leverage the unique properties of time diary data, analysts are increasingly interested in creating tempograms and conducting sequence analyses, both of which capitalize on the temporal specificity of time diary data. These techniques allow researchers to explore the timing and order of activities over the course of a day. Both creating tempograms and conducting sequence analysis require time units that are consistent across respondents. Most time diary data are not natively in this format.

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Conceptualizing Structural Racism with IPUMS Time Use Data

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By Solvejg Wastvedt and Yash Singh

A major challenge for researchers studying racism is measuring the consequences of this macro-level phenomenon in people’s everyday lives. For the purposes of this post we define structural racism as a system of racialized advantage and disadvantage underlying and structuring multiple domains of life, including housing, interactions with government, education, the criminal legal system, and more. 1 2 3 4 5 Structural racism does not refer to individual prejudices or discriminatory beliefs. Rather, it is a macro-level phenomenon: a principle upon which structures in our society are built. When researchers study racism as a structural force, its impacts in any one area affect and reinforce impacts in every other area.

The consequences of structural racism for individuals are well-documented; for example, research shows structural racism produces poorer health outcomes for racialized groups. 6 However, research often focuses on a single aspect of structural racism, such as police brutality, and struggles to capture the full impact of this multidimensional phenomenon. Measures used to assess impacts of structural racism typically differ by domain, and while robust research documents these impacts, it can also be difficult to capture the mechanisms through which they occur.

Time — specifically time use — is a type of data that can unite studies of structural racism across domains and offer a glimpse into how this macro-level force acts on individuals.

Time is a form of capital: we only have so much of it, and time spent in one place is not spent elsewhere. For example, an individual living in a segregated neighborhood because of residential discrimination may be required to drive long distances for work or health care. This reduces time available for all other activities, including exercise. The resulting lack of time may lead, in turn, to negative health outcomes. While simply an illustration of one possible pathway linking the macro and micro levels, this example shows how time use data can capture impacts across multiple domains and, ultimately, on daily life.

IPUMS Time Use provides data from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS), a nationally representative U.S. time diary survey. In this post, we highlight measures from the ATUS corresponding to two aspects of structural racism: residential segregation and discrimination in government services. Researchers interested in other aspects can create and select variables from IPUMS ATUS data to match their areas of interest.

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Things to Consider when Using the 2020 American Time Use Survey

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By Kelsey J. Drotning

Curious about how COVID-19 has affected time in leisure, sleep, work, and family activities in the United States? The 2020 ATUS will provide some clues. Data from the 2020 American Time Use Survey (ATUS) were released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics on July 22, 2021. The data have been harmonized with previous ATUS surveys by the IPUMS team, released on July 30, 2021. The 2020 ATUS provides a window into how daily lives shifted in response to COVID-19 pandemic conditions and the corresponding economic recession via 24-hour time diaries. Potential research topics include, but are not limited to:

  • What, where, and with whom people spent their time post-onset compared to pre-onset of the pandemic
  • Differences in daily activities by gender, race, ethnicity, nativity, age, parental and marital status, household composition, employment status, education.
  • How daily activities, such as work, time with children, school, commuting, socializing and sleep changed as social distancing restrictions were enacted, lifted or maintained across U.S. states

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IPUMS Announces 2020 Research Award Recipients

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IPUMS research awardsIPUMS is excited to announce the winners of its annual IPUMS Research Awards. These awards honor the best-published research and nominated graduate student papers from 2020 that used IPUMS data to advance or deepen our understanding of social and demographic processes.

IPUMS, developed by and housed at the University of Minnesota, is the world’s largest individual-level population database, providing harmonized data on people in the U.S. and around the world to researchers at no cost.

There are six award categories, and each is tied to the following IPUMS projects:

  • IPUMS USA, providing data from the U.S. decennial censuses, the American Community Survey, and IPUMS CPS from 1850 to the present.
  • IPUMS International, providing harmonized data contributed by more than 100 international statistical office partners; it currently includes information on 500 million people in more than 200 censuses from around the world, from 1960 forward.
  • IPUMS Health Surveys, which makes available the U.S. National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) and the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS).
  • IPUMS Spatial, covering IPUMS NHGIS and IPUMS Terra. NHGIS includes GIS boundary files from 1790 to the present; Terra provides data on population and the environment from 1960 to the present.
  • IPUMS Global Health: providing harmonized data from the Demographic and Health Surveys and the Performance Monitoring and Accountability surveys, for low and middle-income countries from the 1980s to the present.
  • IPUMS Time Use, providing time diary data from the U.S. and around the world from 1965 to the present.

Over 2,500 publications based on IPUMS data appeared in journals, magazines, and newspapers worldwide last year. From these publications and from nominated graduate student papers, the award committees selected the 2020 honorees.

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How has COVID-19 affected 2020 data collection efforts?

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By Julia A. Rivera Drew, Sarah M. Flood, Renae Rodgers

IPUMS integrates data from several major US surveys that collect data throughout the year. Below, we discuss how COVID-19 has affected how US statistical agencies have collected these survey data in 2020.

Current Population Survey (CPS)

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and the Census Bureau have continued to collect data on a monthly basis during the COVID-19 pandemic, implementing some procedural modifications to protect the safety of respondents and Census Bureau employees and adding a short supplement to capture the effects of the pandemic on work in the United States.

Changes to Interviewing Procedures

Current Population Survey (CPS) data collection for March had already begun when the Census Bureau suspended in-person data collection on March 20th, 2020. Two call centers that assist with CPS data collection also closed down at this time. However, data collection continued exclusively by phone through June of 2020. In July, in-person interviews began in some areas of the country and the call centers that had been closed in March re-opened. In-person interviews were resumed in all areas of the country in September 2020 and data collection has returned to a normal routine. More information on how alternative data collection procedures affected response rates, attrition, and employment data is available on the IPUMS CPS website.

Additional COVID-related content

The COVID-19 outbreak prompted the BLS to add five questions to the monthly CPS survey about work in the time of COVID-19. These questions were first asked in May. Though the question about foregoing medical care due to the pandemic was dropped from the survey after October of 2020, all other questions will remain in the survey until further notice. Researchers may preview the questions or access the COVID-specific variables via IPUMS CPS.

IPUMS CPS will continue to update our documentation on the effects of the pandemic on CPS data collection and to make new data available as quickly as possible. Follow @ipums on Twitter for the latest updates.

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