LIFE COURSE CENTER, AN NIA CENTER ON THE DEMOGRAPHY AND ECONOMICS OF AGING

Data Feature: IPUMS Time Use

Time diary data enable researchers to study the rhythms of daily life. These data provide detailed respondent reports of the sequence of activities they engaged in over a 24-hour period and typically include detail about how long the activity lasted, where they were, who they were with, and what else they were doing. Time diary data include many activities per person, which, by definition, sum to 24 hours per day. 

IPUMS Time Use (https://timeuse.ipums.org/) contains three distinct collections of harmonized time diary data. While the general structure of the data is similar, the collections are harmonized to maximize compatibility among the datasets they each include. IPUMS ATUS includes the American Time Use Survey, which is fielded annually from 2003 to the present by the U.S. Census Bureau for the Bureau of Labor Statistics. These data are harmonized for compatibility across the two decades they are available. The American Heritage Time Use Study (AHTUS) is available via IPUMS AHTUS. It includes the ATUS along with smaller investigator-led data collections fielded at various points between 1930 and 2001. IPUMS AHTUS is more limited than the IPUMS ATUS collection, including only the subset of variables that are available across most datasets collected over the nearly 100-year time period. IPUMS MTUS includes data from nearly 20 developed countries from 1965 to the present. This project is a collaboration with the Centre for Time Use Research at University College London. IPUMS MTUS data are harmonized for use across time and countries. 

Read More