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Handbook of Methods American Time Use Survey More info

American Time Use Survey: More info

Further information on the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) can be found through the ATUS website: www.bls.gov/tus/.

ATUS estimates are available at multiple locations on the BLS website and in a number of formats:

• Time series data from the BLS LABSTAT database: www.bls.gov/tus/labstattips.htm
• Archive of ATUS news releases: www.bls.gov/tus/news.htm
• Published tables with ATUS estimates: www.bls.gov/tus/tables.htm
• Charts with the most recent annual ATUS estimates: www.bls.gov/tus/charts.htm
• Unpublished tables of time-use estimates by age, ethnicity, employment status, educational attainment, marital status, presence and age of household children, and other categories, available by emailing ATUS staff at ATUSinfo@bls.gov

Researchers and others interested in working directly with ATUS microdata files can download these files for free from www.bls.gov/tus/data.htm. The ATUS questionnaires, User’s Guide, data dictionaries, activity coding lexicons, and coding rules manuals, as well as other documentation, are available at www.bls.gov/tus/documents.htm.

Analyses of ATUS data and survey methods have appeared in numerous publications, including peer-reviewed journals and government reports. The ATUS website contains an index (with links when available) of published articles, working papers, and reports at www.bls.gov/tus/research.htm.

Many other countries have carried out time-use surveys, and more are planning to conduct them in the future. Although the ATUS is the first federally funded, national, continuous time-use survey in the United States, several smaller scale studies have been conducted. Early efforts at collecting time-use data included U.S. Department of Agriculture—sponsored studies of the time use of farm housewives during the 1920s and 1930s, along with time-use studies conducted by the University of Michigan in the 1960s through the 1980s and by the University of Maryland in the 1990s and 2001. The ATUS was designed to be comparable, at broad levels, with information from other countries and with earlier time-use studies conducted in the United States. The Centre for Time Use Research at the University of Oxford maintains an index of all international time-use data and research at www.timeuse.org/. In addition, Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) provides American Heritage Time Use Study (AHTUS) and Multinational Time Use Study (MTUS) microdata for research purposes. The microdata can be accessed at www.ipums.org/timeuse.shtml.