Supporting Statement A

SUPPORTING STATEMENT

A. JUSTIFICATION

1. Necessity of the Information Collected

The purpose of this request for review is for the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) to obtain clearance for a Well-being Module to the American Time Use Survey (ATUS), scheduled to be conducted for one year, starting in January 2012. The proposed questions appear in Attachment A. As part of the ATUS, the module will survey individuals ages 15 and over from a nationally-representative sample of approximately 2,190 sample households each month. If approved, the Well-being Module questions will be asked immediately after the ATUS and will follow up on some of the information ATUS respondents provide in their time diary. (The time diary is a section of the ATUS interview in which respondents report the activities they did over a 24-hour period that mainly encompasses "yesterday," or the day before the interview.) The Well-being Module is sponsored by the National Institute on Aging (NIA) of the National Institutes of Health and is contingent upon funding.

The core of the proposed Well-being Module will collect data about how people experience their time, specifically how happy, tired, sad, stressed, and in pain they felt yesterday. Respondents will be asked these questions about three randomly-selected activities from the time diary; a few activities, such as sleeping and private activities, will never be selected. The module also will collect data on whether people were interacting with anyone while doing the selected activities, how meaningful the activities were to them, and some general health questions.

The collection of the Well-being Module in 2012 is the second effort to gather data on individuals' well-being. The Well-being Module, as described above, was attached to the ATUS in 2010 and collected under the ATUS OMB Number 1220-0175. The proposed 2012 version of the module will include two additional questions to collect data about individuals' life satisfaction and their emotional experience yesterday. These questions were added because the 2010 Well-being Module did not take the full time available and they will add information useful in research on well being. The proposed module will be collected under a new OMB Number as a supplement to the ATUS.

The ATUS is the Nation's first federally-administered, continuous survey about time use in the United States. The survey is sponsored by BLS and conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau. In the ATUS, a nationally-representative sample of persons from households completing their final month of interviews for the Current Population Survey (CPS) is drawn for the ATUS. From each household, one person age 15 or older is selected for a one-time ATUS interview. The primary focus of the interview is on collecting the time diary, although additional questions are asked about the respondent's household composition and work during the prior week.

Time-use data are considered important indicators of both quality of life and the contribution of non-market work to national economies. They measure, for example, time spent caring for children, volunteering, working, sleeping, and doing leisure and other activities.

Collection of time-use data fits well within the BLS mission, as outlined in Title 29, United States Code, Section 1:

“The general design and duties of the Bureau of Labor Statistics shall be to acquire and diffuse among the people of the United States useful information on subjects connected with labor, in the most general and comprehensive sense of that word, and especially upon its relation to capital, the hours of labor, the earnings of laboring men and women, and the means of promoting their material, social, intellectual, and moral prosperity.”

2. Needs and Uses

The data from the proposed Well-being Module will support the BLS mission of providing relevant information on economic and social issues. The data will provide a richer description of work; specifically, it will measure how workers feel (tired, stressed, in pain) during work episodes compared to non-work episodes, and how often workers interact on the job. It can also measure whether the amount of pain workers experience varies by occupation and disability status.

Data on life satisfaction will provide more comprehensive information about people’s well-being beyond the point-in-time information collected by the affect questions and could also be compared to the activity-level data. For example, it could provide information about whether people who are more satisfied with their life spend their time differently than those who are not as satisfied. It also could be used as an indicator of the average well-being of various subpopulations, such as older Americans or those in poor health. Such information is important for public policy.

Life satisfaction will be collected using a Cantril ladder scale, which has been widely used to measure well-being by a variety of researchers and organizations, including Gallup.¹ Asking the Cantril ladder question in the ATUS will be valuable for measuring wellbeing in itself, by gathering life evaluation data in an official national survey. It will also enable researchers to build a link between time use and day reconstruction methods of measuring well-being on the one hand, and standard life evaluation questions on the other. This will permit a direction of research that has not been possible to date and will enhance the value both of the ATUS supplement and other surveys that use the Cantril ladder.

The typical day question will be used to explain variance in responses to the affect questions. A similar question was asked in the Day Reconstruction Method (DRM) study² and was found to be an important explanatory variable of this variation. Asking about whether the prior day was a typical day ensures that one is picking up on the normal range of activities and associated experiences, rather than on people’s reactions to exceptional events.  Just as it is important to separate weekend and weekdays when examining time use and affect, it may be important for some purposes to focus analyses on typical days only. The typical day question also asks for a global affective evaluation of the day as better than or worse than a typical day.  Like life satisfaction measures, these global affective evaluations of the day may relate differently to the reported activities than the activity-linked affect measures.  

The data from the Well-being Module closely support the mission of the module’s sponsor, NIA, to improve the health and well-being of older Americans. By analyzing the module data, the experience of pain and aging can be studied. Some of the questions that can be answered include:

• Do older workers experience more pain on and off the job?

• Is the age-pain gradient related to differences in activities or differences in the amount of pain experienced during a given set of activities?

• Do those in poor health spend time in different activities?

The Well-being Module data files are intended to be used as a data set for researchers. The 2010 Well-being Module data were made available to the general public at the beginning of November 2011; thus, research using the data is currently unavailable, though researchers associated with NIA have done preliminary analysis. Use of these data files has been encouraged by NIA in NIH research grants.

3. Use of Information Technology

The U.S. Census Bureau, which collects and processes the data for BLS, uses state-of-the-art methods to conduct interviews and record respondent information.

Census Bureau interviewers conduct all interviews over the telephone, completing the respondent’s time-use diary using Computer Assisted Telephone Interviewing (CATI). Using an automated call scheduler and hourly reports from the system, cases are presented to interviewers in order depending on respondents’ designated interview days, pre-set appointment times, CPS information on the best time to call respondents, and other information.

The ATUS questionnaire and coding instrument are built in Blaise, a windows-based software package developed by Statistics Netherlands and adopted as the Census Bureau standard. The software’s graphical user interface (GUI) enables the usage of data entry grids that accept many entries on one screen. This feature enables the interview to be flexible, making reporting easier for respondents. It also facilitates efficient and accurate coding of diary activities.

A debit card tracking system is in place to manage incentive payments to “no-telephone-number” households in the sample.

4. Efforts to Identify Duplication

There have been a few efforts to collect data on how people experience their time on an episodic basis. The ATUS first ran a well-being module of questions in 2010. This module was largely identical to the proposed 2012 Well-being Module, however, unlike the proposed 2012 version, it did not include a question to measure respondents' life satisfaction or a question about their emotional experience "yesterday." Instead, the 2010 Well-being Module focused on collecting affect data for selected activities as well as some information about respondents' health. Running the proposed 2012 Well-being Module will build upon the depth and scope of data available from the 2010 Well-being Module.

In recent years, a few independent surveys have collected data on Americans' well-being. A couple of these surveys have used a time diary in conjunction with episodic-level questions about respondents' emotional experience, however, these surveys lack the scope and representativeness of the ATUS data. The Daily Reconstruction Method (DRM) collected data on time use, episodic-level affect data, and information about respondents' overall life satisfaction in 2004. This survey was smaller in scale than the ATUS (the analytical focus was on 909 women who reported working in their time-use diary) and relied on a convenience sample rather than a nationally-representative sample. Another independent survey, the Princeton Affect and Time Survey (PATS) was modeled on the ATUS and the DRM, and collected time-use and affect data from nearly 4,000 respondents in 2006. Other independent surveys have included questions to measure respondents' overall life satisfaction.

5. Minimizing Burden to Small Entities

The data are collected from individuals in households; their collection does not involve any small businesses or other small entities.

6. Consequences of Less Frequent Collection

Fielding the Well-being Module in 2012 may allow for more detailed analyses of several important subpopulations. Time-use patterns change little from year to year, so multiple years of the ATUS can be pooled. It is not known how much affect data change from year to year, but it they do not change much from 2010 to 2012 then the module data also can be pooled, providing a sufficient number of observations of subgroups to expand the number of meaningful and detailed analyses. For example, while much useful analysis can be done with one year's data on individuals' well-being, the cell sizes become small when looking at individuals by specific demographic, household, or other characteristics. If the affect data in 2010 and 2012 are different enough such that they cannot be combined across years, then the differences between the years would be of analytical interest.

A 2012 Well-being Module will allow researchers to take advantage of an important change that was made to the ATUS in 2011. Questions that identify eldercare providers and eldercare activities were added to the survey. The well-being of eldercare providers is of interest to the NIA and policy makers because the elderly population is growing, along with a reliance on informal care providers to assist them. A 2012 Well-being Module would allow researchers to study the well-being of eldercare providers.

Additionally, the proposed 2012 Well-being Module includes the addition of two important questions: one to measure a respondent's overall life satisfaction and a second that provides more information about their overall emotional experience yesterday. These questions will provide an additional dimension to analyses of the activity-level affect data.

7. Special Circumstances

Affect data in the Well-being Module are collected for randomly-selected activities. These activities are coded using a classification system not in use in any other Federal survey. A coding lexicon was developed to classify reported activities into 17 major categories, with two additional levels of detail. (ATUS coding lexicons can be found on the Internet at: www.bls.gov/tus/lexicons.htm). BLS designed the ATUS lexicon by studying classification systems used for time-use surveys in other countries, drawing most heavily on the Australian time-use survey lexicon, and then determining the best way to produce analytically relevant data for the United States. The coding lexicon developed for the ATUS was extensively tested by U.S. Census Bureau coders and by coders at Westat prior to the start of full production in 2003. The development of the ATUS lexicon is described in "Developing the American Time Use Survey activity classification system," by Kristina Shelley, available at: http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2005/06/art1full.pdf.

No other special circumstances apply.

8. Federal Register Notice/Consultation Outside the Agency

1. No comments were received as a result of a Federal Register notice published in 76 FR 41302 on July 13, 2011.

2. The following people have been consulted concerning the development of the survey:

National Institute on Aging (NIA)

Richard Suzman

Director, Division of Behavioral and Social Research (BSR)

National Institute on Aging

U.S. National Institutes of Health

Gateway Building Room 533

7201 Wisconsin Avenue

Bethesda, MD 20815

(301) 496-3131

Bureau of the Census

Richard A. Schwartz

Chief, Consumer Expenditure Survey Branch

Demographic Surveys Division

Bureau of the Census

4600 Silver Hill Rd, Rm. 6H041

Washington, D.C.  20233-8400

(301) 763-7491

9. Paying Respondents

Participants in the Well-being Module will not receive compensation beyond what they already receive for participating in the ATUS. In the ATUS, the majority of respondents do not receive compensation. BLS offers $40 incentives to respondents from “no-telephone-number” households only. Persons in these households either do not own a phone or have not given a phone number to the Census Bureau as of CPS month-in-sample 8 (final month). They account for about 5 percent of the CPS sample, and are more likely to be black, to have less education, and to have lower household incomes than members of households that provide phone numbers. The number of such cases is relatively small—approximately 1,680 cases in 2010. Because these households may differ from phone households on unobservable characteristics, including their time-use patterns, and because providing incentives to this small group is not cost prohibitive, BLS believes it is beneficial to expend additional effort and expense to secure their responses.

10. Assurance of Confidentiality

The Census Bureau employees hold all information that respondents provide in strict confidence in accordance with Title 13, United States Code, Section 9. (See Attachment B.) Each interviewer has taken an oath to this effect, and if convicted of disclosing any information given by the respondent may be fined up to $250,000 and/or imprisoned up to 5 years. In addition, Title 13 prohibits Census Bureau employees from disclosing information identifying any individual(s) in the ATUS to anyone other than sworn Census employees.

Respondents are informed of their right to confidentiality under Title 13 in the ATUS advance letter, mailed approximately 10 days before the interview date. (See Attachment C.) The ATUS advance letter also advises respondents that this is a voluntary survey.

All Census Bureau security safeguards regarding the protection of data files containing confidential information against unauthorized use, including data collected through Computer Assisted Telephone Interviewing (CATI), apply to ATUS data collection.

The BLS Processing System design requires that ATUS data be securely transferred from the Census Bureau server to the BLS server. This process mirrors the process used to transfer CPS data.

11. Justification for Sensitive Questions

Some of the proposed Well-being Module questions may be sensitive. After the respondents complete the main ATUS interview, the CATI instrument will randomly select three activities, and respondents will be asked, on a scale from 0 to 6, how happy, tired, stressed, sad, and in pain they felt during the activity, and also how meaningful the activity was. These affect questions will not be asked for certain personal activities (e.g., sleeping, grooming, or sex). For the remaining activities for which these questions will be asked, none of the 28 participants in the 2008 cognitive testing thought the questions were too personal (see Attachment D).

During the 2008 cognitive testing of the well-being questions, participants were also asked how they reacted to being asked how they felt during an activity. The majority (23 out of 28) either had no reaction or felt neutral about the questions (e.g., “the questions were fine”). The remaining 5 participants did not express discomfort with the questions. Their comments were mainly about the nature of the scale or how interesting or revealing the questions were to them. Finally, when asked their reaction to the explanation of why the government was collecting these data, only 1 out of the 28 felt that the government should not collect the information.

The proposed 2012 Well-being Module includes two additional questions that were not included in the 2010 Well-being Module. One question is a measure of overall life satisfaction and the second question collects data about respondents' overall emotional experience yesterday. In 2011, the sensitivity of each of these questions was cognitively tested in the context of the ATUS. Participants in the testing did not perceive the questions as sensitive; however, some participants thought others might think they were sensitive. When asked to provide additional information about why others might find the questions sensitive, participants in the testing provided general responses indicating some people are more private and do not like to share information about themselves (see Attachment K).

12. Estimate of Respondent Burden

The estimated respondent burden for the proposed 2012 Well-being Module is 1,100 hours. This is based on an average respondent burden of approximately 5 minutes. The 2010 Well-being Module lasted an average of 4.5 minutes and was completed by about 12,800 respondents. The addition of two questions to the module is expected to lengthen its duration to approximately 5 minutes in 2012.

The overall annualized dollar cost to the respondents for collection of the 2012 Well-being Module is expected to be $13,750 per year. This estimate assumes a wage rate for all respondents of $12.50 an hour, the median hourly earnings for workers paid by the hour in 2010.

13. Estimate of Cost Burden

1. Capital start-up costs: $0

2. Total operation and maintenance and purchase of services: $0

14. Cost to the Federal Government

The total estimated cost of the 2012 Well-being Module is $273,000. This cost is to be borne by the National Institute on Aging of the National Institutes of Health and largely represents the charge by the Census Bureau for conducting the module. Census activities for this supplement include programming the questionnaire, developing and conducting interviewer training, collecting data, processing survey microdata, and developing public use files. The $273,000 also includes BLS activities of cognitive testing, data editing, developing and conducting training, call monitoring, and the administration of the interagency agreement.

15. Changes in Respondent Burden

The 1100 increase in burden hours in the BLS information collection budget is a result of the reinstatement of the Well-being Module in 2012. The overall respondent burden is expected to be greater for the 2012 Well-being Module than it was for the 2010 Well-being Module. Average response time is estimated to increase slightly from the 2010 Well-being Module because two questions are proposed for addition in 2012. The 2010 Well-being Module lasted 4.5 minutes, but the 2012 Well-being Module is expected to average 5 minutes per respondent. The number of respondents to the 2012 Well-being Module is expected to be about the same as in 2010, when there were approximately 12,800 respondents.

16. Time Schedule for Information Collection and Publication

The proposed 2012 Well-being Module will be collected for the duration of the 2012 calendar year. Processing of the module will be done as the data come in, and final data processing will be completed by mid-2013. The 2012 Well-being Module public use files will be posted on the ATUS Web site at www.bls.gov/tus.

As with the 2010 Well-being Module data files, the 2012 data files are intended for use by researchers and no news release is planned. NIA recently funded a significant set of awards on the measurement of subjective wellbeing. Because the module data are the only national data on hedonic well-being that are linked to activities and time use, several of the awards will make use of these data.  NIA also expects to receive additional applications that propose using the ATUS Well-being Module data. 

17. Request to Not Display Expiration Date

The Census Bureau does not wish to display the assigned expiration date of the information collection because the instrument is automated and the respondent, therefore, would never see the date. The advance letter sent to households by the Census Bureau contains the OMB survey control number for the ATUS.

18. Exceptions to the Certification

There are no exceptions to the certification.

1 Gallup (2011). Understanding How Gallup Uses the Cantril Scale. Gallup. Retrieved December 19, 2011, from http://www.gallup.com/poll/122453/understanding-gallup-uses-cantril-scale.aspx.

2 Kahneman, D., Krueger, A. B., Schkade, D., Schwarz, N., & Stone, A. A. (2004). A survey method for characterizing daily life experience: The Day Reconstruction Method (DRM). Science (3 December 2004), 1776-1780.