Supporting Statement A_Leave Module

ATUS Leave Supplement

1220-NEW

October 2016

SUPPORTING STATEMENT A

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 Leave Module to the American Time Use Survey (ATUS), scheduled to be conducted for one year, starting in January 2017. The proposed questions appear in Attachment A. As part of the ATUS, the Module will survey employed wage and salary workers, except those who are self-employed, who are ages 15 and over. Respondents will be selected from a nationally-representative sample of approximately 2,060 sample households each month. If approved, the Leave 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 Leave Module is sponsored by the Department of Labor’s (DOL) Women’s Bureau.

The proposed Leave Module will collect data about workers’ access to and use of paid and unpaid leave, job flexibility, and their work schedules. The collection of the Leave Module in 2017 is the second effort to gather data on workers’ access to paid and unpaid leave. A Leave Module similar to the one being proposed was attached to the ATUS in 2011 and collected under the ATUS OMB Number 1220-0175. Although many questions remain the same, some have been dropped, others have been modified, and some have been added to obtain better information about workers’ job flexibilities and work schedules. As in 2011, data will be collected on employees’ access to paid and unpaid leave and their leave activities (e.g., instances of leave taking, leave denials, and non-use of leave). 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 to determine the respondent's labor force status and household composition.

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 Leave 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 workers’ access to paid and unpaid leave, the reasons for which workers are able to take leave, leave activity, and information about job flexibilities and work schedules. The Module will also provide more information on the relationships between work schedules, job flexibilities, and time use. Some information about leave is available from other surveys, such as the BLS National Compensation Survey, but these data are collected from establishments. The proposed ATUS Leave Module will collect leave information from individuals, allowing for the production of nationally-representative estimates for the U.S. civilian noninstitutional population and various subpopulations, such as by race, ethnicity, and sex. Many of the proposed questions about job flexibilities and work schedules are based on questions last collected in May 2004, as a “Work Schedules and Work at Home Supplement” to the Current Population Survey.

The data from the Leave Module closely support the mission of the Module’s sponsor, DOL’s Women Bureau, to identify, research, and analyze the topics working women care about. Some of the questions that can be answered by analyzing the proposed Module data include:

• What are the characteristics of people with access to paid leave? Only unpaid leave?

• In which occupations do workers have the greatest and least access to paid leave?

• For what reasons are workers able to take leave from their jobs?

• How many workers have access to job flexibilities such as the ability to work from home or to adjust their start and stop times? What are the characteristics of people with and without access to job flexibilities?

• What is the relationship between workers’ time use and their access to job flexibilities?

• On days they work, how does time use vary for those who work at home compared with those who work at their workplace?

The Leave Module data files are intended to be used as a data set for researchers. The 2011 Leave Module data were made available to the general public in August 2012. In addition, BLS published a news release summarizing the results (available at www.bls.gov/news.release/leave.nr0.htm.)

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

The proposed questions about leave will provide information about access to a broad range of types of paid and unpaid leave, recent leave activity, and workers' job flexibilities and schedules. Because the ATUS interviews people nearly every day of the year, the proposed leave questions will collect data throughout the year and they will thus capture any seasonal patterns that might exist in leave activity. Data about leave currently are available from the BLS National Compensation Survey, but these data are collected from establishments and do not include information about workers' demographic and household characteristics. The proposed Module questions will provide information about workers' access to leave from workers' perspectives and by various characteristics such as their sex, ethnicity, race, and the presence and age of children in the household. The BLS National Longitudinal Survey collects some information about leave from employed individuals, but these data are available only for specific cohorts and not the entire population. Information about flexible work schedules is available through the CPS Work Schedules and Work at Home Supplement, but the Supplement has not been conducted since May 2004. The proposed Leave Module questions will collect data about leave, job flexibilities, and work schedules from a sample of individuals who are representative of the U.S. civilian noninstitutional population ages 15 and over, which is something existing surveys do not do.

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

The data from the Leave Module will provide a richer description of work, including information about the reasons for which workers are able to take paid and unpaid leave, their use of leave, and information about whether workers can adjust their schedules to balance personal and work obligations instead of taking leave. They also will shed light on how the nature of work has changed in recent years, particularly as technology has radically changed the workplace and facilitated job flexibilities for some, such as the ability to work from home. There is currently little available data on these topics. This information is important for understanding the current nature of work and how people balance work and personal needs.

Additionally, the proposed 2017 Leave Module includes several questions that were not included in the 2011 Module. This includes questions about shift work, advance notice of schedules, workers’ control over their schedules, flexible start and stop times, and work at home arrangements. These questions will provide an additional dimension to analyses of workers’ job flexibility data.

7. Special Circumstances

In the ATUS time diary, 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. One public comment was received as a result of a Federal Register notice published in 81 FR 48850 on July 26, 2016.

The commenter stressed support for the continuation of the ATUS and the proposed Leave Module. The commenter noted that “while information on leave policy and actuality is available elsewhere, having this information together with data on how people spend their non-work time is uniquely possible with the ATUS. This unique combination is important if for no other reason than that it allows us to learn how leave policy interacts with such activities as child and eldercare, and domestic household activities. This is thus a unique vehicle with which to answer some important questions underlying policy.”

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

Department of Labor Women’s Bureau

Tiffany Boiman

Director, Office of Policy and Programs

Women’s Bureau

U.S. Department of Labor

Department of Labor Women’s Bureau

Michelle Vaca

Economist

Women’s Bureau

U.S. Department of Labor

U.S. Census Bureau

Beth Ashbaugh Capps

Assistant Survey Director - American Time Use Survey

Associate Director for Demographic Programs

U.S. Census Bureau

Bureau of Labor Statistics

William Mockovak

Senior Statistician

Office of Survey Methods Research

Bureau of Labor Statistics

Department of Labor

9. Paying Respondents

Participants in the Leave Module will not receive compensation beyond what they already receive for participating in the ATUS. BLS offers $40 incentives to respondents from “no-telephone-number” households only. Persons in these households do not own a phone, have not provided a phone number to the Census Bureau as of CPS month-in-sample 8 (final month), or are among a small number of households that provided Census with nonworking phone numbers. Two OMB-approved incentive expansions were implemented in recent years and, as of 2013, incentives are now sent to individuals for whom the Census Bureau assigned call outcome codes of: 108 Number not in service; 109 Number changed, no new number given; 124 Number could not be completed as dialed; and 127 Temporarily not in service after the first week of collection. Individuals who are sent incentives account for about 8 percent of the ATUS sample, and are more likely to be black, of Hispanic or Latino ethnicity, 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 2000 potential cases each year. 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

None of the questions in the proposed Module were perceived as sensitive during cognitive testing.

12. Estimate of Respondent Burden

The estimated respondent burden for the proposed 2017 Leave Module is 496 hours. This is based on the number of eligible respondents (5,950) and an average respondent burden of approximately 5 minutes.

The overall annualized dollar cost to the respondents for collection of the 2017 Leave Module is expected to be $6,666 per year. This estimate assumes a wage rate for all respondents of $13.44 an hour, the median hourly earnings for workers paid by the hour in 2015.

Estimated Annualized Respondent Cost and Hour Burden

Total Respondents	Number of Responses per Respondent	Average Burden per Respondent (in Hours)	Total Burden Hours	Hourly Wage Rate**	Total Burden Costs
5,950	1	5/60	496	$13.44	$6,666

**Costs are rounded to the nearest dollar and calculated using 2015 median hourly earnings ($13.44) from the Current Population Survey¹.

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 2017 Leave Module is approximately $300,000. This cost is to be borne by the DOL Women’s Bureau and largely represents the charge by the Census Bureau for conducting the Module. Census activities for this Module total approximately $200,000 and include programming the questionnaire, developing and conducting interviewer training, collecting data, processing survey microdata, and developing public use files. The remaining $100,000 is for the 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

This is a new data collection.

16. Time Schedule for Information Collection and Publication

The proposed 2017 Leave Module will be collected for the duration of the 2017 calendar year. Processing of the Module will be done as the data come in, and final data processing will be completed by mid-2018. The 2017 Leave Module public use files will be posted on the ATUS Web site at www.bls.gov/tus.

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 The 2015 median hourly earnings are from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Current Population Survey, Table A-7: Hourly earnings of employed wage and salary workers paid hourly rates by age, sex, race, and Hispanic or Latino ethnicity and Non-Hispanic ethnicity, Annual Average 2015. See Attachment N.

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