No child present for childcare activities?

TIME USE
1

Hello,

I was using the RELATEW variable for childcare activities and came up with a confusing case. To be concrete, let’s focus on activity "030101 (Physical care for hh children). I noticed that most of instances involved RELATEW == 202 (own household child), which seems to be consistent with the definition of the variable “RELATEW reports the relationship to the respondent of the individual with whom the activity was performed”.

However, I also noticed that there are a small number of CASEID-ACTLINE observations where RELATEW = 100 (alone). An example is CASEID “20060112051593”, ACTLINE 8. More generally, there were cases of 030101 without a children involved, which seems to be inconsistent with the definition of the activity. How should I think about these cases? Thanks!

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This is a known occurrence as respondents’ answers do not always conform to expected logical patterns. A possible scenario is that some respondents interpreted the RELATEW question “Who was with you? / Who accompanied you?” as implicitly excluding children because the child’s presence is implied in the activity itself. We leave the decision of how to incorporate instances of childcare time without any reported children present up to individual researchers. An example of a similar disconnect between responses about travel in the ATUS is discussed in this blog post.

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