Cohabitating unions have become increasingly common in American society as has parenthood among cohabiting couples. Several studies have considered differences in the quality and nature of married and cohabiting relationships with much evidence showing that cohabitors have lower relationship quality than married individuals. Extending this literature in light of recent evidence that marriage and cohabitation exert similar effects on individual well-being, we use the American Time Use Survey (2003-2014) to investigate whether married and cohabiting individuals differ in the time they spend with a partner, variation by parenthood, and the effects of shared time on well-being. Preliminary findings indicate that among non-parents married individuals spend more time with a spouse than cohabiting individuals. While married parents spend more time together overall than cohabiting parents, cohabiters spend more time alone together and less time with a partner and children. Next steps will leverage unique new data to examine differences in well-being.

Patterns of daily activities situated in the context of the location, time of day, presence of others and emotional experiences which time diaries collect offer essential data enabling us to understand what factors drive long-term trends in behaviour, and to predict how policies might encourage desirable shifts in behaviour while avoiding simultaneous change that might undermine policy aims. As daily life offers an essential dimension to a vast range of research topics, time use surveys offer better value for money than most surveys considering the potential uses for the money expended on data collection. To achieve this value for money, however, researchers need to use the data. Even now, few universities offer training in the analysis of time use data. Making access to customised data subsets ready for analysis quickly matters to the success and continued expansion of this field. The IPUMS Time Use data extract builder suite is one tool delivering essential data resources to time use researchers. This timepiece details the release of the latest project in this collection of archives, the American Heritage Time Use Study Data Extract Builder (AHTUS-X).

Social engagement is theorized to promote health, with ages 55 to 75what some call encore adulthoodpotentially being a time for ongoing engagement or social isolation. We use the American Time Use Survey (N = 11,952) and a life course perspective to examine associations between paid work, resources, relations, and healthy time use for men and women in the first (5564) and second (6574) halves of the encore years. Work limits sufficient sleep (full-time working men) and television watching (all workers) but also time spent in physical activity (full-time workers). College-educated and healthy encore adultsacross age and gender dividesare more likely to exercise and watch less television. Marriage and caregiving encourage socializing and limit television watching, despite differential effects on physical activity and sleep. These findings fit well with a gendered life course perspective suggesting socially patterned (by work, resources, relationships, gender, age) health behaviors.

This paper investigates spouses shared time across countries to understand how social conditions and policy are related to married couples time allocation. To do this, we use time use surveys from four countries with varying social conditions and welfare regimes. We use information about who is present during activities to analyze total time with spouse, time with spouse only and time with spouse and children. We use two surveys from each country to estimate changes over time and compare shared time during periods of economic expansion (around 2000) and periods of recession (around 2010). To our knowledge, this is the first study analyzing couples time spent together in a cross national context. Our preliminary results comparing USA and Spain show American couples spending less time with a spouse than Spanish couples.

Despite major demographic changes over the past fifty years and strong evidence that time spent with a spouse is important for marriages, we know very little about how time with a spouse has changed, or not changed, in the United States. Using time use survey data from 1965-2012, we examine trends in couples shared time in the United States during a period of major changes in American marriages and families. We find that couples without children spend more total time together and time alone together now than they did in 1965, both peaking in 1975. For parents, time spent together increased continually over the period, most dramatically for time spent with a spouse and children. Decomposition analyses show that changes in behavior rather than changing demographics explain these trends, and we find that the increases in couples shared time are primarily concentrated in leisure activities.

This study examines linkages between parental work arrangements and mothers subjective wellbeing, asking how mothers market work, the presence of a partner or spouse, and partners work patterns predict subjective well-being while caring for children. Further, it examines potential mediators of these linkages. In doing so, we contribute to the literature on parental employment and parenting by shedding light on contextual features that influence the moment-to-moment interactions between mothers and their children. We find that mothers long work hours are linked to more fatigue in time with children. Additionally, fathers non-employment and long work hours are associated with reductions in maternal well-being while parenting. Not having a partner was strongly associated with mothers subjective well-being in parenting; single mothers were consistently less happy and more sad and stressed in their time with children than were partnered mothers. Finally, looking at a broad range of activities with children, we find that the type of activity matters for subjective well-being in time with kids; playing and socializing are associated with improved well-being, while cleaning and market work are associated with reduced well-being. Most of the parenting activities we assessed, however, reveal the mixed bag of parentingit is meaningful but also stressful. These findings show the value of considering momentary assessments of well-being across a multidimensional set of indicators.

Steady increases in womens labor force participation over the past half century have occurred alongside the ratcheting up of expectations for intensive parenting. We know little about how mothers fare in the context of dual devotions to work and parenting. Using a new module in the 2010 and 2012 American Time Use Surveys, we assess mothers subjective well-being in parenting in the context of her and her partners work arrangements. Preliminary results suggest that compared to non-working mothers, working mothers do less of the desirable parenting tasks like play and more of that which is less desirable. This differential may explain working mothers lower happiness and higher stress and fatigue in parenting.Further, mothers working full-time while theirpartners work less than full time report less happiness, more stress, and more fatigue inparenting than those with other workarrangements, even full-time working mothers withfull-time working partners.

The shift towards more time-intensive and child-centered parenting in the U.S. is widely assumed to be positively linked to healthy child development, but implications for adult well-being are less clear. We go beyond prior work on parenthood and well-being to assess the multidimensional nature of mothers and fathers subjective well-being in time with children. Our emphasis on parenting (activities) as opposed to parenthood (status) draws attention to how the nature and context of time use contribute to differences in parents happiness, meaning, sadness, stress, and fatigue. We posit that time with children may elicit more positive and negative feelings than time without children, particularly among mothers, whose greater investments in childrearing may be associated with more strain but also more meaning. Relying on nationally representative time diary data from the 2010 well-being module of the American Time Use Survey (N = 23,282), we find that parents consistently report more positive affect in time with children than without. Mothers report less happiness, more stress, and greater fatigue (but not more meaning) in time with children than fathers, and their greater fatigue is not explained by mediating factors such as the quality and quantity of sleep and leisure, activity type, or solo parenting.

Data from the Current Population Survey (CPS) are rarely analyzed in a way that takes advantage of the CPS's longitudinal design. This is mainly because of the technical difficulties associated with linking CPS files across months. In this paper, we describe the method we are using to create unique identifiers for all CPS person and household records from 1989 onward. These identifiers-available along with CPS basic and supplemental data as part of the on-line Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS)-make it dramatically easier to use CPS data for longitudinal research across any number of substantive domains. To facilitate the use of these new longitudinal IPUMS-CPS data, we also outline seven different ways that researchers may choose to link CPS person records across months, and we describe the sample sizes and sample retention rates associated with these seven designs. Finally, we discuss a number of unique methodological challenges that researchers will confront when analyzing data from linked CPS files.

Understanding poverty in terms of time use is not a new phenomenon. A 1977 article by Vickery theorizes a generalized definition of poverty using both income and time dimensions. She uses time diary data to identify families who are income poor, time poor, and both and highlights the importance of a time dimension to poverty, particularly as it relates to different household configurations. Under her generalized definition of poverty,"...the 1973 poverty population would have increased the number of poor female-headed families with children by 14 percent and increased the proportion of all families in poverty from .008 to .093 (35)." This paper uses the American Time Use Survey (ATUS-X) and the Current Population Survey (CPS) Annual Social and Economic Supplement (ASEC) from 2003 to 2011 to update Vickery's analysis. We estimate poverty rates from 2003-2011 by income, time, and a combination of both for diverse household configurations. We also estimate the effect of household configuration on changes to the definition of poverty, controlling for a variety of socio-demographic factors such as age, race, and education.

This paper examines the association between "active life style" behaviors and health. Health is measured with the widely-used five-category general self-rated health indicator (excellent, very good, good, fair, or poor). Analyses are based on the 2006-2008 and 2010 waves of American Time Use Survey (ATUS). For respondents in the 2010 wave of the ATUS, we also examine three specific health outcomes: whether the individual (1) has hypertension, 2) took pain medication on the diary day, and 3) woke up rested on the diary day. Finally, in 2010 we have measures of ATUS respondents' momentary perception of well-being during each of three randomly selected activities. Our study is the first that we know of to examine the association between health behaviors and general and momentary measures of well-being.

Recent media attention highlights American womens exceptionalism in the realm of intensive parenting and raises questions about the implications for mothers well-being. In this paper we: 1) assess the multidimensional nature of subjective well-being among women with and without children in the home across a range of activities; and 2) compare mothers subjective well-being while engaged in intensive versus routine childcare. We use new data from the 2010 American Time Use Survey that includes respondent reports of momentary well-being in three randomly selected activities. We leverage within-person variation in reports of meaning, happiness, stress, tiredness, and sadness to assess how the presence of children and other characteristics of activities (whether others present, timing, duration, location) contribute to well-being. We look further at variation in subjective well-being while parenting in the context of time in activities throughout the day, union status, child and parent age, education, employment, and typical sleep duration.

The American Time Use Survey (ATUS) is an ongoing time diary survey funded by the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics and fielded by the United States Census Bureau. Data collection began with some 20,000 interviews in 2003 and 14,000 responses have been collected each subsequent year. ATUS respondents are a nationally representative sample of persons aged 15 and older drawn from households who have concluded their participation in the Current Population Survey (CPS), the monthly labor force survey in the United States. For each activity during the day covered by the ATUS interview, respondents are asked what they were doing, where they were, and who was with them. Background information about the ATUS respondents and their households is collected as part of the ATUS interview. The ATUS public use files also include information collected during the households final CPS interview. The survey is designed to permit the addition of modules on specific topics, such as the 2006-2008 Eating and Health Modules sponsored by the Economic Research Service of the United States Department of Agriculture, the 2010 Well-Being Module sponsored by the National Institute on Aging, and the 2011 Leave Module sponsored by the U.S. Department of Labor Womens Bureau...

Understanding patterns of daily life among contemporary retirement-age Americans ages 60 to 75 is of heightened importance as growing numbers of boomers and those in the cohort preceding them move through this life stage. In this paper, we focus on time spent in healthy behaviorskey risk factors for health and wellbeing which are even more important because they are potentially modifiable. We take a gendered life course approach considering gender as a primary organizing factor in daily life as well as the structuring effects of work and the potential rolelessness of non-work for older Americans. We use OLS regression to analyze daily time allocations to healthy and unhealthy behavior (sleep, exercise, meal preparation, leisure, and paid work) among retirement-age men and women using the American Time Use Survey (2006-2008). Along with employment status and gender, we consider the effects of health status and day of the week on time patterns.