Identifying the Third Agers: An Analysis of British Retirees' Leisure Pursuits

Despite the recent theoretical focus on the emergence of the Third Age as a period of fulfilment and an ongoing engagement with an active leisure lifestyle, there is a dearth of quantitative studies on how older people spend their time. Few studies of later life capitalise on time-use surveys, which constitute the most widely employed and accurate methodology for collecting data on everyday life. This article analyses data from the 2000 UK Time Use Survey in order to operationalise the concept of the Third Age and test theoretical propositions regarding the irrelevance of social divisions in the formation of an active leisure lifestyle after retirement. The analysis focuses on a subsample of 1615 people over the age of 64. An index of active leisure activities is constructed in order to estimate the proportion of third agers amongst British retirees. Logistic regression models are specified to examine the relative influence of socio-demographic characteristics on the probability of a person being a third ager. Strong effects of structural factors and health are found, which do not support arguments suggesting a minor influence of social context in lifestyle choices after retirement. 'Active' ageing appears to be the province of those who are culturally and materially advantaged, and it is the healthy, educated, upper-class and middle-class men that are more likely to engage in a Third Age leisure lifestyle.Active Leisure; Retirement; Time-Use Research; Third Age; Successful Ageing; UK

Changing times together? A time diary analysis of family time in the digital age in the UK

Objective This study examines the impact of digital mobile devices on different aspects of family time in the United Kingdom. Background Recent years have witnessed increasing concerns surrounding the consequences of the widespread diffusion of Internet-enabled mobile devices such as smartphones for family wellbeing. However, research examining the extent to which mobile devices have influenced family time remains limited. Method Using nationally-representative time diary data spanning a period of unprecedented technological change (United Kingdom 2000 and 2015 Time Use Surveys), the authors construct a set of novel family time measures that capture varying degrees of family togetherness and examine changes in these measures over time. Novel diary data are also analyzed to explore the occurrence of mobile device use during different aspects of family time in 2015. Results Children and parents spent more time at the same location in 2015, and there was no change in the time they spent doing activities together. However, there was a marked increase of alone-together time, when children were at the same location as their parents but did not report they were co-present with them. Results show that children and parents used mobile devices during all aspects of family time in 2015, but device use was notably concentrated during alone-together time. Conclusion This study provides an empirical basis for documenting the impact of mobile device use on family time

Alone together: how mobile devices have changed family time

There is now widespread concern about the amount of time children spend staring at screens – with many people worried about the negative impacts mobile devices might have on health and well-being

Does diary mode matter in time-use research?

Recent years have witnessed an increasing interest in the use of new technologies for time-use data collection, driven by their potential to reduce survey administration costs and improve data quality. However, despite the steady growth of studies that employ web and app time diaries, there is little research on their comparability with traditional paper-administered diaries that have long been regarded as the “gold standard” for measurement in time-use research. This paper investigates diary mode effects on data quality and measurement, drawing on data from a mixed-mode large-scale time diary study of adolescents in the United Kingdom. After controlling for observable characteristics associated with diary mode selection and adolescent time-use, we find that web and app diaries yield higher quality data than paper diaries, which attests to the potential of new technologies in facilitating diary completion. At the same time, our analysis of broad time-use domains does not find substantial mode effects on measurement for most daily activity categories. We conclude by discussing avenues for future methodological research and implications for time-use data collection

Doubly disadvantaged? Bullying experiences among disabled children and young people in England

Bullying among school-aged children and adolescents is recognised as an important social problem, and the adverse consequences for victims are well established. However, despite growing interest in the socio-demographic profile of victims, there is limited evidence on the relationship between bullying victimisation and childhood disability. This article enhances our understanding of bullying experiences among disabled children in both early and later childhood, drawing on nationally representative longitudinal data from the Millennium Cohort Study and the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England. We model the association of disability measured in two different ways with the probability of being bullied at ages seven and 15, controlling for a wide range of known risk factors that vary with childhood disability. Results reveal an independent association of disability with bullying victimisation, suggesting a potential pathway to cumulative disability-related disadvantage, and drawing attention to the school as a site of reproduction of social inequalities

Data quality in web and app diaries : a person-level comparison

The time-use diary is a complex and burdensome data collection instrument. This can negatively affect data quality, leading to less detailed and/or inaccurate activity reporting as the surveyed time period unfolds. However, it can also be argued that data quality may actually improve over time as respondents become more familiar with the diary instrument format and more interested in the diary task. These competing hypotheses have only been partially tested on data from paper and telephone-administered diaries, which are traditionally used for large-scale data collection. Less is known about self-administered modes that make use of new technologies, despite their increasing popularity among researchers. This research note rectifies this omission by comparing diary quality in self-administered web and app diaries, drawing on data from the Millennium Cohort Study. We construct a person-level data quality typology, using information on missing data, episode changes, and reporting of key daily activity domains. Results show significant mode differences on person-level data quality, after controlling for characteristics known to influence diary mode selection and data quality. App diarists were more likely to return two diaries of inconsistent quality. Both respondent fatigue and improvement of completion over time appear more common among app diarists

Disability, social class and stigma : an intersectional analysis of disabled young people’s school experiences

Recent decades have witnessed a renewed interest in stigma and its effects on life-course trajectories of disabled people. However, sociological narratives largely adopt monolithic understandings of disability, neglecting contextual meanings of different impairments and conditions and their intersections with other ascriptive inequalities, which may be consequential for exposure to stigma. Our article provides an intersectional analysis of disabled young people’s lived experiences of stigma in mainstream school settings. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 35 autistic, dyslexic and/or physically disabled students, we show that stigmatisation is contingent on social class background, which affects students’ location within the school. We also find substantial variation in experiences of stigma between and within sub-categories of conditions/impairments, as a consequence of the perceived distance from normative ideals of skills and behaviour attached to individuals in school settings. Our findings highlight the importance of intersectional analyses of stigma, challenging universalised views about stigmatised disabled people

Childhood disability, social class and social mobility : a neglected relationship

Disability theorists have long highlighted the role of institutional, social, and environmental barriers in constructing disability, emphasizing its parallels with other socially constructed axes of stratification. However, despite theoretical developments toward sociological understandings of disability, social stratification and life-course research have largely neglected childhood disability as a social division. As a result, we still know little surrounding the socio-economic attainment of disabled children and young people. Drawing on Next Steps data, this research note highlights stark overlooked inequalities between disabled and non-disabled young people's activity status and social mobility in early adulthood. We specifically focus on the importance of social class for disabled young people's outcomes, emphasizing the need for intersectional analyses of disability inequalities. We also outline longitudinal survey data enhancements necessary for life-course research on childhood disability and its intersections

Using new technologies for time diary data collection : instrument design and data quality findings from a mixed-mode pilot survey

Recent years have witnessed a steady growth of time-use research, driven by the increased research and policy interest in population activity patterns and their associations with long-term outcomes. There is recent interest in moving beyond traditional paper-administered time diaries to use new technologies for data collection in order to reduce respondent burden and administration costs, and to improve data quality. This paper presents two novel diary instruments that were employed by a large-scale multi-disciplinary cohort study in order to obtain information on the time allocation of adolescents in the United Kingdom. A web-administered diary and a smartphone app were created, and a mixed-mode data collection approach was followed: cohort members were asked to choose between these two modes, and those who were unable or refused to use the web/app modes were offered a paper diary. Using data from a pilot survey of 86 participants, we examine diary data quality indicators across the three modes. Results suggest that the web and app modes yield an overall better time diary data quality than the paper mode, with a higher proportion of diaries with complete activity and contextual information. Results also show that the web and app modes yield a comparable number of activity episodes to the paper mode. These results suggest that the use of new technologies can improve diary data quality. Future research using larger samples should systematically investigate selection and measurement effects in mixed-mode time-use survey designs