American Heritage Time Use Study (AHTUS)

The American Heritage Time Use Study, a database of national time-diary samples collected over five decades, includes harmonised background, activity, location, mode of transport and who else was present variables. The AHTUS is suitable for a wide range of investigative purposes.

As these data are freely available to the research community, we ask the help of users to make programmes and publications developed using this data available to other users. Kindly email such material to the AHTUS team.

The initial development of this project allowing release 1 in May 2006 was conducted under an agreement with Yale University (Program on Non-Market Accounts), and was sponsored by the Glaser Progress Foundation. Some amendments to this dataset made from December 2005 through December 2009 were funded by the ESRC.

In January 2010, we have:

• made minor corrections to the 1985, 1992-94, 2003 data,
• recovered the background variables of the 1985 child diarists,
• added the 1995 and 2004-2005 data,
• updated the documentation and concordance file to cover the amendments and additional data

We are in process of adding the 2006-2009 ATUS data.