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February 2002, Vol. 125, No. 2

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

Lisa K. Schwartz, Diane Herz and Harley Frazis

The current design for the BLS American Time Use Survey does not include questions intended to measure the use of time by household members other than the individual who is selected as the "designated person." In an article in this issue of the Review, Anne E. Winkler recommends that the United States adopt an approach similar to one used by Statistics Canada to obtain some information about time use by more than one individual in a household.¹  The designers of the American Time Use Survey, as well as many others, agree that measuring all adult household members’ use of time would produce valuable information on how household members jointly—and not just individuals singly—allocate their time. However, a conscious decision was made not to attempt to collect this kind of information in the first year of full production of the survey, chiefly because it was necessary to devote developmental resources to other issues.

This excerpt is from an article published in the February 2002 issue of the Monthly Labor Review. The full text of the article is available in Adobe Acrobat's Portable Document Format (PDF). See How to view a PDF file for more information.

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Footnotes

1  Anne E. Winkler, "Measuring time use in multiple-person households," this issue pp. 45–52.

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American Time Use Survey

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