Hi,
I am working on the harmonized MTUS data (version 11) to replicate occupational physical activity for the US as estimated by Time Use and Physical Activity: A Shift Away from Movement across the Globe - PMC.
I see that the information for respondent occupation is only available for 1965 and then from 2003 onwards. I’m unsure why the same information was removed for years 1975,1985,1993,1995 and 1998. I also wanted to check if this information was previously versions of the MTUS that has this information.
Any guidance on finding data on respondent occupation would be much appreciated. Thank you!
I assume you are referring to U.S. data from the MTUS. Please correct me if that is not the case.
The paper you referenced does not appear to use IPUMS data; IPUMS is not cited in the paper, and the authors refer to the MTUS data provided by the Centre for Time Use Research (CTUR), with whom we partner to provide MTUS data via IPUMS MTUS. I’m not sure whether or how the authors of the study obtained data on occupation from U.S. time use data from 1975, 1985, 1992-1994 (“1993”), 1994-1995 (“1995”), and 1998-2001 (“1998”). Occupation is not included in the U.S. MTUS data from these years—IPUMS did not remove any occupation variable from these samples. You can see that occupation is not available in these samples in the CTUR’s documentation (see page 10 of CTUR’s document “AHTUS background variables”). See also source documents for each sample from IPUMS MTUS.
Occupation was collected in the 1965-1966 Multinational Comparative Time-Budget Research Project, the survey from which the U.S. 1965 sample comes from in IPUMS MTUS. While we do not provide the occupation variable for this sample via IPUMS MTUS, we do provide it via IPUMS AHTUS. IPUMS AHTUS provides data from the American Heritage Time Use Study. The U.S. samples provided in IPUMS AHTUS are the same as those provided in IPUMS MTUS. However, the harmonization procedures are different—IPUMS MTUS harmonizes data from all over the world to be consistent and comparable across time and space. IPUMS AHTUS harmonizes U.S. data only from multiple years, so the harmonization is just over time, within the same country. Thus, harmonization looks different for these two data collections, and variable details and codes are often different.
You could reach out to the authors of the paper directly if there is not sufficient information in the paper itself to determine how they obtained information on occupation in the U.S. from the years of interest.