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February
2002, Vol. 125, No. 2
The American Time Use Survey: cognitive pretesting
Lisa K. SchwartzIn the early 1990s, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS, the Bureau) began exploring the feasibility of conducting a new survey to measure how Americans spend their time. The primary purposes of the survey were (and still are) to improve estimates of time spent in nonmarket activities (for example, child care) and in market-related work and to provide data on a variety of quality-of-life indices beyond income and earnings. In 1998, a BLS working group developed specifications for the American Time Use Survey and began pretesting the questionnaire through a series of cognitive studies that investigated how respondents understood and interpreted the survey’s concepts and questions. Today, the Bureau continues developing and testing the survey, with full production scheduled for calendar year 2003.
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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