Comment by Brybry

That's a nice find. I think BLS leisure time data is from the American Time Use Survey [1] which I think is asking something similar to this questionnaire [2] on page 22.

I'm not sure that's saying household time. For example, when they survey a household it wasn't clear to me if they survey everyone in the household or just one person. If it's one person then it sounds like they collect how that one person (age 15+) spent their own time and if there were kids in their household.

So then it'd be accurate to say that individuals in households without kids watch more TV as a singular activity (the survey doesn't allow simultaneous activities).

In comparison Nielsen used TV viewing diaries and automated data collection meters. You could have the TV on in the background while doing chores and it would still count.

It's interesting that the 2009 ATUS survey [3] had a 2.82 hour/person average because that's fairly different from the Nielsen data (4 hours 49 minutes/person).

I wonder if this difference is people underreporting in ATUS or Nielsen overreporting or a factor of differences in limitations in ATUS (no simultaneous activities allowed, 15+ age limitation) or Nielsen.

[1] https://www.bls.gov/opub/hom/atus/data.htm

[2] https://www.bls.gov/tus/questionnaires/tuquestionnaire.pdf

[3] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/archives/atus_06222010.pdf