COVID-19 Impacts on Time Use and Well-Being

Summary: This supplemental proposal has one objective that falls under the parent project's first aim ofDatabase Expansion, which is to add five new years of ATUS data from 2016 to 2020; todouble the number of countries included in a web-based portal entitled IPUMS-Time Use; and toincorporate newly-digitized U.S. time diary data from the 1920s and 1930s. Our objective is tosupport data collection on the well-being, quality of life, and physical and mental health of alarge and nationally representative cohort of children and adults ages 15 and older spanningJanuary through December 2021. The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted American's dailyroutines, increased stress and worry for many, and amplified pre-existing racial, gender, andsocial class inequities in health and well-being. Evidence suggests that these consequencesmay not be short-term, especially since the course of this pandemic is unknown. Time diarydata in general and well-being data in particular are the best sources of information forunderstanding how COVID-19 affects Americans' daily lives and perceptions of health and well-being. The American Time Use Survey (ATUS) is the only large, nationally representativesource of information about how, where, and with whom the U.S. population spends their timeoutside of paid work. The proposed data collection will replicate the ATUS Well-Being Module(WBM) that was previously fielded in 2010, 2012, and 2013, and will add a new question toassess current family well-being in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The WBM collecteddetailed information about Americans' experienced momentary well-being at three points duringthe interview day, that can be tied to specific contexts during the day - what people were doing,where they were, who they were with, and when they felt these emotions. These data willenable the scientific community to investigate adherence to and effects of containment andmitigation efforts on daily behaviors, well-being, quality of life, and health, by subgroup. This isof particular interest to NICHD because of the link to early life conditions, family processes andparenting, and the health and well-being of the next generation of Americans, taking intoaccount variability across population subgroups. Our web-based portal, IPUMS Time Use,currently archives and makes available data from historical American surveys of time use, theAmerican Time Use Surveys from 2003 to the present, as well as data from 13 other countriesacross the globe. After processing, we will incorporate the WBM data into our datadissemination system, IPUMS Time Use, which is easily and freely accessible to the researchcommunity, and promoted broadly through webinars and a video training library.