Increasing the Usability of the American Time Use Survey: IPUMS ATUS

This paper describes IPUMS ATUS, which simplifies the use of time diary data by disseminating a harmonized and enhanced version of the American Time Use Survey (ATUS). The ATUS time diary data capture the detailed activities over a 24 h period for thousands of respondents along with their sociodemographic characteristics. The ability to measure, at a population level, how people spend their time provides nearly endless possibilities for examining questions that hinge on understanding human behavior. The flexible data format can be used to estimate time use as captured by stylized survey questions (e.g., sleep duration, work hours), but it also allows for the study of activity sequencing and the context of time use (e.g., where it happens, who else is present). However, wrangling the complex, hierarchical record structure of the data requires advanced programming skills. To address these challenges, IPUMS ATUS harmonizes the ATUS data and provides customization tools that allow researchers to (i) combine data from multiple original ATUS files and (ii) easily create and save custom variables that summarize time use utilizing the full array of contextual information spread across the complex record structure of the ATUS.