American Time Use Survey — Activity Coding Lexicons

The ATUS Activity Coding Lexicon is a 3-tiered classification system with 17 first-tier categories. Each of the first-tier categories has two additional levels of detail. Respondents' reported activities are assigned 6-digit activity codes based on this classification system. Activity codes are periodically evaluated and updated prior to the start of each year’s data collection. This page contains links to the ATUS Activity Coding Lexicons.

2003 to 2008 Coding documentation

• Differences between the 2003 to 2008 single-year lexicons (PDF)

• Method for combining activity codes that changed from 2003 to 2008 (PDF)

• ATUS Coding Rules Manual (PDFs): (2008) (2007) (2006) (2005) (2004) (2003)

ATUS Single-Year Activity Coding Lexicons:

• No activity examples (PDFs) (2008) (2007) (2006) (2005) (2004) (2003)

• With activity examples (PDFs) (2008) (2007) (2006) (2005) (2004) (2003)

• With activity examples (Zip files) — these zip files contain Excel files (2008) (2007) (2006) (2005) (2004) (2003)

ATUS Multi-Year Activity Coding Lexicons:

• Differences between the 2003-07 and 2003-08 multi-year lexicons (PDF)
• Multi-Year Activity Coding Lexicons (2003-08) (2003-07)—List of ATUS multi-year activity codes. The multi-year ATUS Activity Coding Lexicons contain Activity Codes unique to the multi-year Activity and Activity Summary files and should not be used with single-year files.

 

Last Modified Date: July 27, 2009