Written by Dr Juana Lamote de Grignon Pérez, 'timeuse' Stata commands are now available to help you with time use data management and cleaning.
Time use diaries keep track of what respondents do throughout the day, where they do it and who they do it with, among other things. Diaries are often collected for entire households allowing for investigation of household dynamics. As a result, time use surveys are an incredibly rich source of data that can inform many disciplines. Yet, most of the potential of time use data remain untapped because of the difficulties associated with the manipulation of these complex data files.
This working paper introduces a new Stata Package timeuse, that facilitates significantly the manipulation of time use diary data. The main programs are timeuse and timeusex. Timeuse transforms the dataset to provide durations and instances of participation for several activities, while timeusex offers more detailed information, but for a single activity. In short, these programs transform the complex episode-level files into ready-to-use files containing the time use information desired by the user. The new files can be used by researchers with no prior experience with time use diary files.
Keep an eye on our website for a webinar on the Stata 'timeuse' commands soon.
You can download the working paper below; however, please note that we are currently preparing an updated version.