Measuring intrahousehold allocation of time: Response to Anne E. Winkler

Monthly Labor Review

Volumn 125, Issue 2, 2002, Pages 53-59

  Schwartz, Lisa K ^a   Herz, Diane ^a   Frazis, Harley ^b  

^a American Time Use Survey   (United States)

^b Off Employment Unemployment Stat   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 11244331778     PISSN: 00981818     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (23)

1. Anne E. Winkler, "Measuring time use in multiple-person house-holds," this issue pp. 45-52.
2. Designers were interested in the feasibility of conducting the survey by phone mainly for two reasons. First, drawing the sample from, and linking back to, the Current Population Survey (CPS) would be facilitated if the American Time Use Survey were a telephone survey. The CPS will provide a wealth of demographic information about respondents to the time-use survey. Second, as noted in F. T. Juster and F. P. Stafford, "The Allocation of Time: Empirical Findings, Behavioral Models, and Problems of Measurement," Journal of Economic Literature, June 1991, pp. 471-522, telephone surveys cost a great deal less than personal-interview surveys without compromising the quality of time diary data.
3. The core time diary will be a listing of the previous day's activities and associated contextual information. All citations of the diary in this article refer to the listing of activities collected during the telephone interview and do not refer to a paper-and-pencil diary completed by the respondent.
4. Stylized questions are survey questions that ask respondents to indicate how much time they spent in various activities or to estimate how often they engage in various activities over a predetermined reference period (See R. Andorka, "Time Budgets and Their Uses," Annual Review of Sociology, vol. 13, 1987, pp. 149-64.)
5. Michele Ver Ploeg, Joseph Altonji, Norman Bradburn, Julie DaVanzo, William Nordhaus, and Francisco Samaniego, eds., Time-Use Measurement and Research: Report of a Workshop (Washington, DC, National Academy Press, 2000).
6. J. Martin and R. Breeten, "The Effect of Interviewer Characteristics on Survey Response Rates," paper presented at the International Conference on Survey Nonresponse, Portland, OR, October 1999, found that household surveys which interviewed only one responsible adult per household took an average of 36 minutes to complete. In comparison, household surveys that interviewed all household adults took an.average of 85 minutes to complete.
7. K. Piskurich, D. Nelson, and D. Herz, "Maximizing Respondent Contact in the American Time Use Survey," 2001 Proceedings of the American Statistical Association, in press.
8. D. Paton, personal communication, 2000.
9. Refusals to participate in the survey and breaking off the interview may be more common with telephone interviews than personal visits mainly because it is easier to put the phone down than it is to refuse someone calling in person. With this in mind, survey designers suggest that telephone interviews should not last longer than 20 minutes. However, shorter or longer interviews may be advised, depending on respondents' level of interest in the survey topic. (See R. Thomas and S. Purdon, "Telephone methods for social surveys," Social Research Update, 1994; on the Internet at www.soc.surrey.ac.uk/sru/ SRU8.html.
10. F. T. Juster, "Response Errors in the Measurement of Time Use," Journal of the American Statistical Association, June 1986, pp. 390-402. Data showed that recall periods of longer than 24 hours resulted in reports that mentioned 5 percent fewer activities on Friday through Sunday. However, the difference was not statistically significant.
11. In the American Time Use Survey field test, a 74-percent response rate was obtained after 8 weeks of data collection for households with telephones. In comparison, after a total of 8 weeks, a 79-percent response rate was achieved with households that received a personal visit after 4 weeks of first trying to contact the respondent by phone. Despite this increase in response rate, a field component for the survey was cost prohibitive: it was estimated that the Bureau would incur an additional cost of approximately $102 per case if the survey included a field component.
12. Winkler, "Measuring time use," p.
13. Satisficing involves superficial searches for information and adopting decisions that are "good enough." For a review, see J. L. Irving and L. Mann, "Satisficing," in J. Billsberry (ed.), The Effective Manager: Perspectives and Illustrations (Bristol, PA, The Open University Press, 1996), pp. 157-9.
14. J. A. Krosnick, "Survey Research," Annual Review of Psychology, vol. 50, 1999, pp. 537-67.
15. Juster and Stafford, "The Allocation of Time."
16. Andorka, "Time Budgets," p. 151.
17. J. P. Robinson, "The Validity and Reliability of Diaries versus Alternative Time Use Measures," in F. T. Juster and F. P. Stafford (eds.), Time, Goods, and Well-Being (Ann Arbor, MI, University of Michigan Press, 1985), pp. 33-62.
18. L. Schwartz and S. Fricker, "What's on Your Mousepad? Asking Questions about Computers and the Internet," internal report (Bureau of Labor Statistics, April 2001).
19. Egocentric bias is the tendency to be more sensitive to, and judge differently, events involving oneself than events involving others.
20. K. L. Hartlep and G. A. Forsyth, "The effect of self-reference on learning and retention," Teaching of Psychology, vol. 27, no. 4, 2000, 269-71.
21. For a detailed examination of the impact of the length of the reference period on the accuracy of respondents' reports of business trips in the American Time Use Survey, see S. Fricker and L. Schwartz, "Reporting Absences from Home: Results of Cognitive Testing of the American Time Use Survey's Missed Days Summary Question, working paper (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2001).
22. Note that the analyst will have information on the respondent's wages as of the previous CPS month if the respondent has not changed jobs and as of the current American Time Use Survey month if he or she has changed jobs. The analyst will have information on the spouse's wages as of the previous CPS month.
23. Ver Ploeg et al., Time Use Measurement and Research, p. 49.