Understanding Unpaid Caregiving using IPUMS
Unpaid caregiving for older adults—most often performed by family members or friends—is an essential yet undercounted part of the care economy. The American Time Use Survey (ATUS), accessible through IPUMS Time Use, is one of the best tools available for studying unpaid care. ATUS includes 24-hour time diaries from U.S. residents, capturing how they allocate their time across, for example, work, care, leisure, and household activities. Researchers can measure time spent caring for children, adults, or household members with health needs, and distinguish between direct care (such as feeding or assisting with mobility) and supervisory or emotional support.
Capturing Unpaid Caregiving for Older Adults
ATUS includes two complementary measures of adult caregiving. The first is activity-based, identifying respondents who report specific adult caregiving activities during the diary day. The second is survey-based, identifying respondents who regularly provide unpaid care to an adult who requires assistance. Using these measures either independently or in combination allows researchers to create a fuller picture of caregiving intensity, regularity, and overlap with paid employment or other ways of spending time (e.g., health behaviors, housework, leisure).
The ATUS also collects detailed information on labor market characteristics, such as occupation, wages, and hours worked, which allow researchers to connect caregiving behavior to engagement in the labor force. This linkage makes it possible to study associations between caregiving and employment, including reduced work hours or exits from the labor force—insights that are essential for designing family-friendly policies and supporting caregivers.
Analytical considerations
The ATUS is a one-day snapshot of time use for each individual respondent. Aggregated at the population level across the year, time diaries can be used to generate estimates of the average amount of time per day that respondents spent in adult caregiving activities in a given year.
Researchers who are looking carefully at the data, however, may notice a disconnect for some ATUS respondents between the activities they report in their time diary (first measure of caregiving) and self-identifying as a caregiver (second measure of caregiving). This isn’t an error, but instead reflects reality for some caregivers. For example, a caregiver may share caregiving responsibilities for a parent with a sibling, dividing responsibilities by day. For the caregiver with Monday, Wednesday, Friday responsibilities who provides the activities they performed on a Tuesday, we might not observe any caregiving activities. This doesn’t mean the ATUS respondent isn’t a caregiver; rather they just weren’t surveyed about a day when they performed their typical caregiving activities.
What this means for researchers using the ATUS to study caregiving is that they need to think carefully about who is in their sample and what this means for any conclusions they draw from their analyses. Be clear about defining terms and clearly describing who is and who is not in your analysis.
Example studies using IPUMS data
Muench U, Jura M, Spetz J, Mathison R, Herrington C. Financial Vulnerability and Worker Well-Being: A Comparison of Long-Term Services and Supports Workers With Other Health Workers. Medical Care Research and Review. 2020;78(5):607-615. doi:10.1177/1077558720930131
Ulrike Muench, Joanne Spetz, Matthew Jura, Charlene Harrington, Racial Disparities in Financial Security, Work and Leisure Activities, and Quality of Life Among the Direct Care Workforce, The Gerontologist, Volume 61, Issue 6, September 2021, Pages 838–850, https://doi.org/10.1093/geront/gnaa190
Ahmed, T., Floro, M.S. Unpaid Care to Older Persons and Tradeoffs in Time Use: The Experience of Working-Age Women and Men in the US. J Fam Econ Iss 45, 71–87 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10834-023-09890-3
Wiersma Strauss, A. The earned income tax credit (EITC) and time spent helping and caring for adults. Rev Econ Household (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11150-024-09731-8
Erin Ice, Bringing Family Demography Back In: A Life Course Approach to the Gender Gap in Caregiving in the United States, Social Forces, Volume 101, Issue 3, March 2023, Pages 1143–1170, https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soac041
Citation:
Introducing the Aging and Health Launchpad. (2026, May 18). Life Course Center, University of Minnesota. https://lcc.umn.edu/node/2011