U.S. Census and American Community Survey microdata from 1850 to the present. Learn More about the IPUMS USA project
Our sense of social connection is related to health and well-being in important ways, and Americans spend an increasing amount of time alone (Kannan & Veazie, 2023). In 2023, U.S. surgeon general Vivek Murthy declared loneliness to be an epidemic, sparking further media attention and scholarly research on the subject. Nationally representative data on how Americans spend their time is key to understanding the loneliness epidemic, sociability, and people’s social lives more broadly. In this blog post, we discuss the use of American Time Use Survey (ATUS) data from IPUMS to study these topics, including some important limitations for data users.
