Who Records for ATUS

TIME USE
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Hi IPUMS team,
I’m working on the ATUS dataset for a long time, but I recently raised some confusion about who records. Would you mind answering the following clarification questions for me?

  1. Is it true that the number of who records linked to each activity would reflect the actual number of persons in the same room or who interacted with the respondent during that activity? For instance, if someone is at work and talks with two coworkers, then there should be two records with two different wholine numbers, both showing “co-workers” for the relatew variable, right? They wouldn’t be combined into one record, even though they belong to the same relatew category, would they?
  2. Does that mean, by counting how many different wholine numbers appear for the same respondent on the diary day, we know exactly how many persons they interacted with?
  3. Further, does the same wholine number within each respondent (or caseid, specifically speaking) also refer to the same person, even for those outside of the household? For instance, if the respondent interacted with wholine=1 at work from 9 to 12am, then this is still the same person they interacted with, say in the afternoon, as long as wholine still equal to 1?

For your convenience, I’ve attached a screenshot of the dataset, but please feel free to take a look at the whole dataset by yourself. Thank you so much for your help in advance!

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The ATUS codebook notes that “there is one record for each ‘who’ code reported.” You can see this reflected in the enumeration instruction screenshot from the ATUS questionnaire (pg. 24). Enumerators cannot enter the same ‘who’ code multiple times to indicate the total number of people who were with the respondent at the time of the activity. Only one ‘who’ record is created for each ‘who’ code provided.

While each household member has their own corresponding ‘who’ code, making it possible to identify the total number of household members who were present, non-household members are grouped into different ‘who’ categories (e.g., respondent’s non-household “parents”, “friends”, “co-workers”, etc.). In the case of co-workers for example, the data does not report the total number of co-workers who were with the respondent but combines them into a single record. In cases where the person is a member of the respondent’s household, their roster line number will be reported in LINENOW. This allows researchers to obtain additional information such as their age AGEW and sex SEXW. Note that the variable WHOLINE is simply an identifier for the who record; it is constructed to sequentially number each who record within an activity regardless of the identity of the actual person.