The purpose of this project is to add a short module (less than 5 minutes) to the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) to gain a better understanding of how Americans experience their time and how their activities relate to their health and subjective well-being. The ATUS collects time use data from approximately 13,000 Americans a year. The supplemental module will collect data on measures of affective experience during randomly selected episodes of the day. The affect measures will relate to the extent to which respondents felt tired, in pain, happy, stressed, sad and interested during the sampled episodes. Individuals will also be asked if they were interacting with someone during sampled episodes, and during sampled work episodes respondents will be asked whether they were mostly alone, with their boss, with coworkers, with clients/customers, or with others. (This type of information is available for most nonwork episodes.) Lastly, some information will also be collected on health status. Information from the ATUS can also be linked to the Current Population Survey, which is expected to include questions on disability status and functional limitations.The broad, long-term goal of this research is to meet the mission of the NIA by measuring the well-being of the U.S. population, including the aging. By marrying time-use data with reports on affective experience, researchers will be able to: (1) identify activities that are associated with similar emotional responses (e.g., pain); (2) track activities in a meaningful way over historical time, across groups (e.g., across age groups) and across countries; (3) better understand the experience of daily life; and (4) develop an index allowing comparison of well being across different population subgroups. An immediate goal is to design a satisfactory set of questions that will fit with the ATUS. In order to do this, cognitive testing will be performed on the proposed new affect and health questions. An initial round of testing was already performed for most of the affect questions by the Gallup Organization. Assuming that a successful questionnaire can be designed, there are many research objectives that the proposed survey module can help achieve. First, the data will provide a richer description of work. How do people feel during work episodes compared to off-work episodes? How often and with whom do workers interact on the job? How do these interactions affect their subjective well-being? The data can also be used to identify and examine the activities that are associated with higher reported pain. With more than one episode per person, this can be studied within subjects. Moreover, the experience of pain and aging can be studied cross sectionally. Do older workers experience more pain on and off the job? How about nonworkers? Is the age-pain gradient due to differences in activities or differences in the amount of pain experienced during a given set of activities? How does the amount of pain experienced at work vary by occupation? How does it vary with disability status? Does the higher pain reported by blue-collar workers than white-collar workers during work episodes carry over to non-work episodes? Thirdly, the connection between activities, pain, and self-reported health status will be examined. In particular, do those in poor health spend time in different activities? Does pain relate to self-reported health status? The two proposed health questions were patterned on the Health and Retirement Survey. Self-reported health has been documented to be related to objective health measures and work-related outcomes (e.g., Bound, 1991; Bound and Waidman, 1992). A bonus is that the Current Population Survey, which can be linked to ATUS, is working to include questions on disability status and functional limitations by the time the affect module goes in the field. This will enable researchers to study how disability and functional limitations relate to daily experience and the incidence of pain.
