By Kari Williams & Stacy Nordstrom
Since 1993, IPUMS has worked to preserve and harmonize population data and make them freely accessible to researchers. This includes time diary data from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) as well as international and historical time diary data. Last month, Drs. Sarah Flood and Liana Sayer, co-PIs of IPUMS Time Use, along with their long-time collaborator Dr. Melissa Milkie, received the Ellen Galinsky Generative Researcher Award, presented by the Work and Family Researchers Network.
The award recognizes work-family researchers who have contributed breakthrough thinking to the work-family field via theory, measures, and/or data sets that led to expansive application, innovation, and diffusion, including the sharing of research opportunities in the spirit of open science. The award committee highlighted Flood’s foundational contributions to public data infrastructure and long history of demystifying complex time diary data, as well as Sayer’s innovative scholarship on gender and social class inequalities in time use over the life course.
As of this writing, over 15,000 people have registered to access the powerful tools that IPUMS offers to streamline data access and simplify complex analyses of time diary data. Time diary data, which report individuals’ activities over a 24-hour period, are a uniquely valuable resource for understanding countless aspects of daily life across time and between demographic groups – they are used to study work, parenting, caregiving, social isolation, health behaviors and many other topics.
“IPUMS was founded with the understanding that democratizing data access advances science. We strive to develop cutting edge data and research tools for the entire research community that simplify the use of time diary data and reduce barriers to using other rich population data sources,” says Flood. “It’s an honor to see this work, done in collaboration with a remarkable group of colleagues, recognized.”
This award joins an impressive list of accolades recognizing IPUMS researchers for their leadership, advocacy, and innovation in simplifying access to worldwide population data. IPUMS was recognized in 2025 with the Research, Science & Technology Institution of the Year award from Geospatial World and in 2022, IPUMS founder, Dr. Steven Ruggles, was named a MacArthur Fellow.