Occupational engagement among community dwelling older people: A time-geographic perspective

Abstract

How older people spend their time in different occupations could contribute to our understanding of everyday life in healthy ageing. This study adopted a time-geographic method and occupational perspective to explore the occupational engagement of community dwelling older people. The term occupational engagement encompasses what people do, where and with whom they spend their time and the perceived level of competence and meaningfulness of their time use. Nineteen volunteers born between 1932 and 1933, living alone in an urban area in northern Sweden and receiving no home care services, completed open time-geographic diaries for 5 days in May 2010. The diary data were analyzed using Daily Life software program. The study revealed the complexity and the diversity of the older people's occupational engagement and that most of their time was spent alone in their home. The older people reported they were very good at doing almost half of the occupations in which they engaged and that their occupations were primarily either very meaningful or meaningful. While some methodological limitations were identified, time-geographic studies of community dwelling older people living independently are considered to have potential to contribute to community and social planning for older people as they can provide interesting insights to older persons' time use and occupational needs.

Exploring How Older People Living at Home Alone Occupy Their Time – A Time-Geographic Study

“…One interesting feature of Vardagen is its flexibility, as the time-use diaries can be customized based on a particular study's aims. Vardagen can also capture the meaningfulness (i.e., the personal importance of daily occupations) as rated by the participant and the extent of daily social connections (Ellegård, 2009;Nilsson et al, 2015). Such occupational features have particular relevance for occupational therapists, whose role is to enable people to participate in the occupations of everyday life; to do the things they need and want to do as individuals, with families and in communities; and to occupy time and bring meaning and purpose to life (World Federation of Occupational Therapists, 2019).…”

“…Human geographers developed the Vardagen program in Sweden in the 1990s, and it has since undergone further development that has occurred in cooperation with Swedish occupational therapists. Since its development, the program has been used by researchers in various fields, mainly human geography, technology, social work, and occupational therapy (Bendixen & Ellegård, 2014;Nilsson et al, 2015;Orban et al, 2012) to explore areas such as living in urban areas and the use of mobile information and communication technologies (ICTs) in everyday life (Ellegård, 2019).…”

“…This study replicated an occupational science research project undertaken in Umea in northern Sweden. It is the first known project to adopt a time-geographic approach with older people as participants (Nilsson et al, 2015). Occupational science was established in 1989 by occupational therapists to generate knowledge about occupation, the core domain of occupational therapists, and to understand the relationship between occupation and health (Zemke & Clark, 1996).…”

“…Gender, as well as disadvantages associated with lower socio-economic levels, have been shown to influence patterns of occupational involvement (Punyakaew et al, 2019;Sabbath et al, 2016), indicating that time use of older people is influenced by various factors. Occupational temporality, when time and space are integrated (Zemke, 2004), could give insights into the occupational needs of older people (Nilsson et al, 2015), which, in turn, could enhance the development of health programs for older people.…”

Podd

“…Activity diaries are commonly aggregated to convey summarized information concerning the total time spent on different types of activity by different groups of individuals. Activity diaries, however, are also increasingly used in the social sciences [1] for example for everyday life and energy-use research [2,6], in occupational therapy [4,5], and in transport research [3]. Diaries have even been used for energy-use modelling of individuals and households [7].…”