The Current Population Survey (CPS) is the primary source of labor force data in the United States; the panel component of the CPS provides an excellent opportunity for studying short-run change in areas such as labor force participation and poverty. The Census Bureau's recommended procedures for linking CPS data occasionally yield a collection of matched observations that appears-based on demographic information-to represent different people rather than a single person across CPS files. We describe our methodology for assigning a unique identifier to records that share Census Bureau identifiers and have demographic characteristics that are consistent across observations. The identifier eliminates a currently-recommended step when working with linked CPS data-checking to ensure that records with a shared identifier look like the same individual based on age, sex, and race-and provides researchers a common starting point for analyzing validated CPS panel data. This identifier extends previous efforts at IPUMS CPS to create unique identifiers for leveraging the panel aspect of the CPS and are available from IPUMS CPS.

The COVID-19 pandemic spurred major, and possibly enduring, changes in paid work. In this chapter, we explore the continuity and change in several work day dimensions, including where it is performed, the amount of time spent working, the length of the work day, and who people are with when they work, as well as variation across population subgroups. We use nationally representative data from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) to analyze change across the 2019 to 2021 period. While the shift to working primarily at home in 2020 is dramatic and continuing into 2021, working primarily at the workplace remains the modal experience for Americans. We find differences by gender, education, parental status, and age in which workers perform their jobs at home, and we find much more continuity in how much people work and when they work.

The Current Population Survey (CPS) has been the nation's primary source of information about employment and unemployment for decades. The data are widely used by social scientists and policy makers to study labor force participation, poverty, and other high-priority topics. An underutilized feature of the CPS is its short-run panel component. This paper discusses the unique challenges encountered when linking basic monthly data as well as when linking the March basic monthly data to the Annual Social and Economic (ASEC) Supplement in the 1976-1988 period. We describe strategies to address linking obstacles and document linkage rates.

This paper addresses the uneven employment effects on older Americans (aged 50–75) of the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on monthly Current Population Survey data from January through December 2020, we...

More Americans aged 50-75 are living alone than ever before (about a third of adults over 60 live alone today–see Ausubel 2020; Esteve 2020), placing older adults at risk of social isolation, and especially so during COVID-19. Not only do demographers’ project the rate of older adults living alone will continue to rise, but they also predict increasing racial disparities due to differential population aging rates (Verdery and Margolis 2017). We pinpoint two mediators of social isolation: employment status and living arrangements, drawing on panel data from the Current Population Survey, from January 2018 through August 2021 (N = 83,232), to investigate whether the pandemic increased disparities in vulnerabilities to social isolation across different subgroups. We use an intersectional lens to consider the experiences of population groups defined by gender, age, race/ethnicity and social class. We know that employment has important protective health benefits (Berkman, et al. 2000; Kelly, et al. 2017). Living arrangements condition social isolation, especially in terms of living alone (Cudjoe, et al. 2020). The aim of our study is twofold. First, we aim to show how the dynamics of living alone and employment participation for older adults change between the immediate pre-Covid period and Covid period, using COVID-19 as a natural experiment in precipitating change. Second, we show how demographic characteristics intersect to structure vulnerability to social isolation during the same period. Our results demonstrate the risks of social isolation are not evenly distributed, suggesting the need for policies and practices promoting social inclusion.

This is an open access arti cle dis trib uted under the terms of a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL The online ver sion of this arti cle (https: / /doi .org /10 .1215 /00703370-9510524) con tains sup ple men tary mate rial. ABSTRACT Identification of indi vid u als in same-sex rela tion ships in the Amer i can Time Use Survey (ATUS) is of increas ing inter est to the research com mu nity. While the ATUS inter views one per son per house hold, by using infor ma tion about who else lives in the house hold, research ers can eas ily iden tify respon dents in cores i dent same-sex cou ple arrange ments. Previous research has outlined two approaches to iden ti fy ing indi vid u als in same-sex rela tion ships in the ATUS that use infor ma tion on the sex of house hold mem bers. We extend that work in this research note by using addi tional infor ma tion col lected from a direct ques tion to iden tify unmar ried cohabiting part ners in the Current Population Survey (CPS). We iden tify 23% more indi vid u als in cohabit-ing same-sex rela tion ships when we use the CPS direct ques tion infor ma tion than when we use infor ma tion from the ATUS alone. We argue that this iden ti fi ca tion strat egy is more inclu sive of indi vid u als in same-sex cohabiting rela tion ships.

Using every major nationally-representative dataset on parental and non-parental care provided to children up to age 6, we quantify differences in American children's care experiences by socioeconomic status (SES), proxied primarily with maternal education. Increasingly, higher-SES children spend less time with their parents and more time in the care of others. Non-parental care for high-SES children is more likely to be in childcare centers, where average quality is higher, and less likely to be provided by relatives where average quality is lower. Even within types of childcare, higher-SES children tend to receive care of higher measured quality and higher cost. Inequality is evident at home as well: measures of parental enrichment at home, from both self-reports and outside observers, are on average higher for higher-SES children. We also find that parental and non-parental quality is reinforcing: children who receive higher quality non-parental care also tend to receive higher quality parental care. Head Start, one of the largest government care subsidy programs for low-income households, reduces inequality in care provided, but it is mainly limited to older children and to the lowest income households. Our evidence is from the pre-COVID-19 period, and the latest year we examine is 2019.

Time-use data can often be perceived as inaccessible by non-specialists due to their unique format. This article introduces the ATUS-X diary visualization tool that aims to address the accessibility issue and expand the user base of time-use data by providing users with opportunity to quickly visualize their own subsamples of the American Time Use Survey Data Extractor (ATUS-X). Complementing the ATUS-X, the online tool provides an easy point-and-click interface, making data exploration readily accessible in a visual form. The tool can benefit a wider academic audience, policy-makers, non-academic researchers, and journalists by removing accessibility barriers to time use diaries.

Research on daily time and how it is allocated has generally considered the time spent in specific activities. However, social theory suggests that time use is socially patterned whether by social organization, heterogeneity, and/or stratification. Drawing on four broad types of time (contracted, committed, necessary, and free), we use Multinomial Logit Latent Class Analysis to discuss eight daily temporal pathways and associations with individual characteristics. Our analysis highlights the variations and similarities across pathways, the impact of paid work in structuring daily life, the social patterning of sleep and leisure, and socio-demographic profiles of the pathways of working-age Americans.

BACKGROUND Time shared with a partner is an indicator of marital well-being and couples want to spend time together. However, time with a partner depends on work and family arrangements as well as the policies, norms, and values that prevail in society. Contrary to time spent with children, couples' shared time in cross-national context is relatively unstudied. Previous studies from specific countries show that dual-earner couples spend less time together and that parents spend less time alone together. OBJECTIVE The aim of our study is to investigate partnered parents' shared time across countries to understand how social conditions, cultural norms, and policy contexts are related to the amount and nature of couples' shared time. Specifically, we compare time with a partner in the US, France, and Spain. METHODS We use data from national time use surveys conducted in the US, France, and Spain. We leverage information about with whom activities are done to examine three types of time shared with a partner for parents with children under age 10: total time with a partner indicates the minutes per day spent in the presence of a partner; exclusive time corresponds to the minutes per day spent alone with a partner when no one else is present; and family time indicates the minutes per day spent with a partner and a child at the same time. RESULTS Our results show that American couples spend the least time together, and Spanish couples spend the most time together. Parents in France spend the most time alone together. The most striking difference across countries is in time with a partner and children, which is much higher among Spanish families. CONCLUSION Paid work constraints explain a small part of the differences in couples' shared time that we observe between countries. Differences in couples' shared time across countries seem to be related to social norms surrounding family and general time use.

The Annual Social and Economic Supplement (ASEC) is the most widely used type of Current Population Survey (CPS) data, but it is cumbersome to use the ASEC as part of a longitudinal CPS panel, especially linking to non-March months. In this paper, we detail the challenges associated with linking the ASEC to monthly CPS data, outline the creation of an identifier that links the ASEC and the March Basic Monthly data from 1989 through 2017, and provide substantive examples that illustrate the value of combining the ASEC with monthly data. The variable, MARBASECID, which we created to link ASEC and March monthly CPS data, represents a significant contribution to social and economic data infrastructure, saving individual researchers from having to duplicate the effort required to create linkages between ASEC and monthly CPS data.