Experiential wellbeing data from the American Time Use Survey: Comparisons with other methods and analytic illustrations with age and income.

There has been a recent upsurge of interest in self-reported measures of wellbeing by official statisticians and by researchers in the social sciences. This paper considers data from a wellbeing supplement to the American Time Use Survey (ATUS), which parsed the previous day into episodes. Respondents provided ratings of five experiential wellbeing adjectives (happiness, stress, tiredness, sadness, and pain) for each of three randomly selected episodes. Because the ATUS Well-being module has not received very much attention, in this paper we provide the reader with details about the features of these data and our approach to analyzing the data (e.g., weighting considerations), and then illustrate the applicability of these data to current issues. Specifically, we examine the association of age and income with all of the experiential wellbeing adjective in the ATUS. Results from the ATUS wellbeing module were broadly consistent with earlier findings on age, but did not confirm all earlier findings between income and wellbeing. We conclude that the ATUS, with its measurement of time use, specific activities, and hedonic experience in a nationally representative survey, offers a unique opportunity to incorporate time use into the burgeoning field of wellbeing research.

Where Have All the Workers Gone? An Inquiry into the Decline of the U.S. Labor Force Participation Rate.

The U.S. labor force participation rate has declined since 2007, primarily because of population aging and ongoing trends that preceded the Great Recession. The labor force participation rate has evolved differently, and for different reasons, across demographic groups. A rise in school enrollment has largely offset declining labor force participation for young workers since the 1990s. Labor force participation has been declining for prime age men for decades, and about half of prime age men who are not in the labor force may have a serious health condition that is a barrier to working. Nearly half of prime age men who are not in the labor force take pain medication on any given day; and in nearly two-thirds of these cases, they take prescription pain medication. Labor force participation has fallen more in U.S. counties where relatively more opioid pain medication is prescribed, causing the problem of depressed labor force participation and the opioid crisis to become intertwined. The labor force participation rate has stopped rising for cohorts of women born after 1960. Prime age men who are out of the labor force report that they experience notably low levels of emotional well-being throughout their days, and that they derive relatively little meaning from their daily activities. Employed women and women not in the labor force, by contrast, report similar levels of subjective well-being; but women not in the labor force who cite a reason other than "home responsibilities" as their main reason report notably low levels of emotional well-being. During the past decade, retirements have increased by about the same amount as aggregate labor force participation has.

The demand for health insurance among uninsured Americans: results of a survey experiment and implications for policy.

Most existing work on the demand for health insurance focuses on employees' decisions to enroll in employer-provided plans. Yet any attempt to achieve universal coverage must focus on the uninsured, the vast majority of whom are not offered employer-sponsored insurance. In the summer of 2008, we conducted a survey experiment to assess the willingness to pay for a health plan among a large sample of uninsured Americans. The experiment yields price elasticities of around one, substantially greater than those found in most previous studies. We use these results to estimate coverage expansion under the Affordable Care Act, with and without an individual mandate. We estimate that 35 million uninsured individuals would gain coverage and find limited evidence of adverse selection.

Linkages among climate change, crop yields and Mexico-US cross-border migration.

Climate change is expected to cause mass human migration, including immigration across international borders. This study quantitatively examines the linkages among variations in climate, agricultural yields, and people's migration responses by using an instrumental variables approach. Our method allows us to identify the relationship between crop yields and migration without explicitly controlling for all other confounding factors. Using state-level data from Mexico, we find a significant effect of climate-driven changes in crop yields on the rate of emigration to the United States. The estimated semielasticity of emigration with respect to crop yields is approximately -0.2, i.e., a 10% reduction in crop yields would lead an additional 2% of the population to emigrate. We then use the estimated semielasticity to explore the potential magnitude of future emigration. Depending on the warming scenarios used and adaptation levels assumed, with other factors held constant, by approximately the year 2080, climate change is estimated to induce 1.4 to 6.7 million adult Mexicans (or 2% to 10% of the current population aged 15-65 y) to emigrate as a result of declines in agricultural productivity alone. Although the results cannot be mechanically extrapolated to other areas and time periods, our findings are significant from a global perspective given that many regions, especially developing countries, are expected to experience significant declines in agricultural yields as a result of projected warming.

Attitudes and action: public opinion and the occurrence of international terrorism.

The predictors of terrorism are unclear. This paper examines the effect of public opinion in one country toward another country on the number of terrorist attacks perpetrated by people or groups from the former country against targets in the latter country. Public opinion was measured by the percentage of people in Middle Eastern and North African countries who disapprove of the leadership of nine world powers. Count models for 143 pairs of countries were used to estimate the effect of public opinion on terrorist incidents, controlling for other relevant variables and origin-country fixed effects. We found a greater incidence of international terrorism when people of one country disapprove of the leadership of another country.

Assessment of pain: a community-based diary survey in the USA.

BACKGROUND: Pain is costly and a major reason for seeking medical care. Our aim was to assess the proportion of people experiencing pain, and the severity of pain, at randomly selected times in a representative sample of individuals in the USA. METHODS: A community-based telephone survey was designed that attempted to contact about 10 700 individuals by random-digit dialling. After collecting diary information for one 24-h period, ratings of pain on a 0-6 anchored scale for three randomly selected 15-min intervals of the day were obtained. Outcome measures were the proportion of intervals with non-zero pain, the proportion of intervals with pain above 3 (the scale midpoint), and the average pain rating. Activities of those individuals who reported substantial pain were also examined. To make the results representative of the US population, sample data were adjusted with sample weights developed by the Gallup Organisation. FINDINGS: 3982 individuals were interviewed (response rate 37%). After adjustment for weighting, 28.8% of men and 26.6% of women reported feeling some pain at sampled times. Those with lower income or less education spent a higher proportion of time in pain and reported higher average pain than did those with higher income or more education. The average pain rating increased with age, although it reached a plateau between the ages of about 45 years and 75 years, with little difference between men and women. Satisfaction with life or health and the pain indicators tended to move in opposite directions. INTERPRETATION: The diary-survey methods described here could be used to study pain at the population level, and will enable the combination of pain assessments with information about activities of daily living.

Would you be happier if you were richer? A focusing illusion.

The belief that high income is associated with good mood is widespread but mostly illusory. People with above-average income are relatively satisfied with their lives but are barely happier than others in moment-to-moment experience, tend to be more tense, and do not spend more time in particularly enjoyable activities. Moreover, the effect of income on life satisfaction seems to be transient. We argue that people exaggerate the contribution of income to happiness because they focus, in part, on conventional achievements when evaluating their life or the lives of others.

A population approach to the study of emotion: diurnal rhythms of a working day examined with the Day Reconstruction Method.

To date, diurnal rhythms of emotions have been studied with real-time data collection methods mostly in relatively small samples. The Day Reconstruction Method (DRM), a new survey instrument that reconstructs the emotions of a day, is examined as a method for enabling large-scale investigations of rhythms. Diurnal cycles were observed for 12 emotion adjectives in 909 women over a working day. Bimodal patterns with peaks at noon and evenings were detected for positive emotions; peaks in negative emotions were found at mid-morning and mid-afternoon. A V-shaped pattern was found for tired and an inverted U-shaped pattern for competent. Several diurnal patterns from prior studies were replicated. The DRM appears to be a useful tool for the study of emotions.

A survey method for characterizing daily life experience: the day reconstruction method.

The Day Reconstruction Method (DRM) assesses how people spend their time and how they experience the various activities and settings of their lives, combining features of time-budget measurement and experience sampling. Participants systematically reconstruct their activities and experiences of the preceding day with procedures designed to reduce recall biases. The DRM's utility is shown by documenting close correspondences between the DRM reports of 909 employed women and established results from experience sampling. An analysis of the hedonic treadmill shows the DRM's potential for well-being research.