DEXSAGE

Older adults face many challenges in their daily lives, including loss of health, loss of close friends and family members and related bereavement. Despite that, the reported satisfaction with life in general is higher for this population group that for their younger counterparts. This study investigates how older adults spend their days and how their daily activities are evaluated. It collects the data on randomly sample activities, including their subjective assessment: experiential wellbeing, stress and effort. This is accompanied by a detailed questionnaire collecting data on individual’s socioeconomic characteristics, health and wellbeing.

This study used experience sampling method (ESM) to collect accounts of individuals’ activities including accompanying emotions. The dataset comprises of 1809 randomly sampled activities provided by 200 individuals aged 65 and above.

The data was collected between January and April 2020. Data cleaning took place immediately after the fieldwork was conducted. No imputations were carried out as i) the number of missing values for subjective states was low, and ii) missing values were random. Next, analyses were carried out to address the research questions. Thus far two research manuscripts were produced and additional analyses were conducted and will be included in the third manuscript. All manuscripts are solo-authored by the project’s principal investigator (PI).

The methodological innovation of this study is the fact that unlike most ESM-based studies which use ANOVA and related techniques, it employs multilevel models and generalized structural equation modelling to analyse repeated-measures data.

The study finds that accumulated experiential wellbeing predicts satisfaction with life in general, controlling for individuals’ socioeconomic background, health, and other affect measures.

Multilevel mixed effects models using experiential wellbeing as outcome variable show that importance attached to activities forms a positive relationship with experiential wellbeing, effort forms an inverted U-shaped association, and stress forms an inverse association. Activities associated with greatest enjoyment were spiritual practice, childcare, and social life.

This study points to the importance of daily activities for older adults’ evaluative wellbeing and comes up with practical implications for policy makers, practitioners and older adults.

Further articles will address the issues of: i) time organization by older adults and its association with the Valuation of Life (VOL); lifestyle differentiation in this population group and its association with particular aspects of health as measured in the Nottingham Health Profile.

Following the articles, the PI will produce research reports for the general audience.

References

The dataset is available at:

Jarosz. E. (2020). DEXSAGE Daily Experiences of Successful Ageing (Version v1) [Data set]. Zenodo. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4017865

Publications (forthcoming):

Jarosz, E. (2021). What makes life enjoyable at an older age? Experiential wellbeing, daily activities, and satisfaction with life in general. Aging & Mental Health, [online first]. DOI: 10.1080/13607863.2021.1916879

Keywords

Wellbeing, older adults, satisfaction with life, experiences, daily activities