I am unclear on how the WT06 weighting variable works. Does applying it yield an average value for time spent on an activity on a given day?
For example, I am looking to calculate the total number of hours (not average) the population spends on a particular activity in a year. If I were to multiply each applicable respondent’s time value for the activity by their WT06 weight, sum this product over all applicable respondents, and then divide this sum by the total sum of WT06 for these respondents, what result would I get? The average time spent by Americans on a given day? If so, would I be able to multiply my result by 365.25 * the size of the US population to yield a total number of hours for the year?
(I’m just doing this in Excel. Unfortunately I don’t have any stats software right now.)
Yes, that’s right. The weights actually sum to the number of person-days in a quarter. But summing the weighted time values and dividing them by the sum of the weights will give an average number of minutes for a given person in a day, which you can multiply by 365 to get an estimate of the average minutes spent on that activity in one year. Note that this will be in minutes.