USA 1975-76

This information has been created by the Centre for Time Use Research at University College London

Samples included

Americans' Use of Time: Time Use in Economic and Social Accounts, a panel study designed and administered by the Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan with funding from the National Science Foundation and the US Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.

Sample description
Country:	USA 1975-76
Study title:	Americans' Use of Time: Time Use in Economic and Social Accounts
Collector:	Survey Research Center, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, with funding from The National Science Foundation and the US Department of Health, Education, and Welfare
When conducted:	Wave 1: 9 October 1975 - 22 November 1975; Wave 2: 6 February 1976 - 28 March 1976; Wave 3: 2 May 1976 - 19 July 1976; Wave 4: 4 September 1976 - 26 October 1976; Wave 5: 1981
Sampling method and study design:	This longitudinal study collected a range of detail on households for national accounts research. The study drew a multi-stage probability sample of the adult population in private households in the contiguous states. The first four waves were spaced over four seasons in a twelve month period to collect a sense of how people's activities change over the year. The researchers attempted a further follow-up in 1981. Respondents were asked extensive detail about household composition, facilities, goods and technology owned, and sources of income. One person per household aged 18 or older was asked to keep a one day (24 hour) diary in each of the five waves of the study that started at midnight, recorded the starting and stopping time of each activity, and covered main activity, secondary activity, location, and who else was present. Where diarists lived with a spouse or partner, the spouse or partner was asked a much shorter questionnaire, and also was asked to keep a time diary on the same day as the main respondent, though the spouse diary did not include who else was present or secondary activity. In the baseline wave, interviewers collected diaries from respondents in face-to-face interviews, sometimes for the same day as activities and sometimes for the activities of yesterday. In subsequent waves, interviews and diaries about activities that took place yesterday were collected over the telephone. Interviewers directly entered data as they collected information. The original data file is close to unusable, and contains 7984 variable columns and 2406 row cases. The first 1515 row cases are for main respondents, and the variable columns cover both information collected from the main respondent and also from the spouse if a spouse was present. The following 887 rows were created for the spouses, with information from the spouse columns on the main respondent rows transposed to the main respondent columns and information from the main respondent columns transferred to the spouse columns in the spouse rows. Extreme caution must be exercised with the spouse rows. For information asked only of the main respondent but not of the spouse, for instance secondary activity, the information is transposed from the main respondent column into the main respondent column on the spouse row. This can create the misleading impression that spouses kept diaries with secondary activity, when this is not the case. The original diaries include a number of errors. Some of these errors are corrected in the American Heritage Time Use Studies version of this dataset, which also is a great deal more user friendly, though not all original variables are captured in the AHTUS version of the data.
Sample size:	Wave 1: 1519 main respondents and 885 spouses; Wave 2: 1147 main respondents and 610 spouses; Wave 3: 1007 main respondents and 520 spouses; Wave 4: 947 main respondents and 489 spouses. 1324 diarists completed diaries in all four waves. The 1981 follow-up collected 667 diaries.
Response rate:	72% responded to the initial diary request; 44.9% completed diaries all four initial waves; 20% answered the 1981 follow-up.
Weighting procedures:	The original data include panel loss weights (v7972) and census weights (v7973)
Sources of information:	John P. Robinson and Geoffrey Godbey (1997). Time for Life: The Surprising Ways Americans Use Their Time. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press Muriel Egerton, Kimberly Fisher and Jonathan Gershuny (July 2005). American Time Use 1965-2003: the Construction of a Historical Comparative File and Consideration of its Usefulness in the Construction of Extended National Accounts for the USA. Produced for the Glaser Progress Foundation and Yale University.
Available documentation:	F. Thomas Juster, Paul Courant, Greg J. Duncan, John P. Robinson, and Frank P. Stafford. User Guide and Codebook: Time Use in Economic and Social Accounts, 1975-76