Everyday activities play an essential role for older adults’ quality of life and successful ageing. Scholarly models of Successful Ageing typically comprise the following components: physical health as measured by low risk of disease or disability; good mental and physical function; and continued engagement with life, including relations with others and productive activity (Rowe & Khan 2002). These overlap with what senior citizens see as detrimental to their quality of life, but in their case the emphasis is placed on different factors. According to the study based on the British Quality of Life Survey (Gabriel & Bowling 2004), these are the following: social relations, living in a safe and pleasant home and neighbourhood with good local facilities, access to quality transportation, solo hobbies and leisure activities, and social and community activities.
Individual’s Valuation of Life (VOL), or, in other words, how long they would like to live, is also strongly associated with people’s daily activities: ‘The way that old people behave and evaluate their time use has emerged (…) as a central aspect of quality of life mediating changes in VOL’ (Moss, et al. 2007).
Activities sequence, 24 hours
Questions that we ask:
“Policymakers, academics and practitioners should recognize the importance of time use and related subjective wellbeing as it can be more important for individual’s valuation of life than physical health.”
This project uses advanced statistical methods to analyse objective and subjective accounts of everyday experiences of adults aged 65+ and link them with daily structures of time-use, quality of life, and psychosocial wellbeing. It uses time-use methodology, but unlike standard time-use surveys it does not sample entire sequences but randomly selected events over the day. The detailed behavioural data is then analysed jointly with end-of-the-day reports. End-of-the-day accounts include information on general subjective wellbeing over a given day as well as on temporal anchors that is events around which individuals have planned other daily activities. This study gives voice to the respondents and asks not only about their experiences but also what they mean to them and whether they are a meaningful way of spending their time.
Everyday activities play an essential role for older adults’ quality of life and successful ageing. Scholarly models of Successful Ageing typically comprise the following components: physical health as measured by low risk of disease or disability; good mental and physical function; and continued engagement with life, including includes relations with others and productive activity (Rowe & Khan 2002). These overlap with what senior citizens see as detrimental to their quality of life, but in their case the emphasis is placed on different factors. According to the study based on the British Quality of Life Survey (Gabriel & Bowling 2004), these are the following: social relations, living in a safe and pleasant home and neighbourhood with good local facilities, access to quality transportation, solo hobbies and leisure activities, and social and community activities.
All acitivites in 24 hours, a sample of multiple adults
Questions that we ask:
Individual’s Valuation of Life (VOL), or, in other words, how long they would like to live, is also strongly associated with people’s daily activities: ‘The way that old people behave and evaluate their time use has emerged (…) as a central aspect of quality of life mediating changes in VOL’ (Moss, et al. 2007).
“Policymakers, academic and practitioners should recognize the importance of time use and related subjective wellbeing as it can be more salient for individual’s valuation of life than physical health.”
This project uses advanced statistical methods to analyse objective and subjective accounts of everyday experiences of adults aged 65+ and link them with daily structures of time-use, quality of life, and psychosocial wellbeing. It uses time-use methodology, but unlike standard time-use surveys it does not sample entire sequences but randomly selected events over the day. The detailed behavioural data is then analysed jointly with end-of-the-day reports. End-of-the-day accounts include information on general subjective wellbeing over a given day as well as on temporal anchors that is events around which individuals have planned other daily activities. This study gives voice to the respondents and asks not only about their experiences but also what they mean to them and whether they are a meaningful way of spending their time.