This study examines the relationship between productive activities and cognitive decline among older adults aged 50 years and over in China and whether this relationship varies by gender and ...urban/rural residence using a sample of 13,596 respondents from three waves of the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study. Results from Generalized Estimation Equations show that caring for grandchildren, caring for a spouse, informal helping and formal volunteering are associated with reduced risk of cognitive decline over a two-year period. In addition, the types of productive activities that are most beneficial for cognition vary by gender and urban/rural residence. Caring for grandchildren and volunteering are most beneficial for urban women, informal helping is most beneficial for urban men, and paid employment is most beneficial for rural men.
•Productive activities are associated with reduced risk of cognitive decline.•This association varies by activity type, gender and urban/rural residence.•Caring for grandchildren and volunteering is more beneficial for urban women.•Informal helping is more beneficial for urban men.•Employment is more beneficial for rural men.
Introduction: Given evidence that activity engagement in older adulthood can have protective effects on the aging brain, we investigated the idea that volunteering in the community, which often ...encompasses social, cognitive, and physical activity, might benefit cognition.
Method: Ninety-one retired 65- to 75-year-olds reported their sociodemographic characteristics, wellbeing, volunteering, and activity engagement. They also completed computerized cognitive tests that tapped specific functions known to decline disproportionately with age.
Results: Volunteering at least monthly was associated with better working memory and more social and cognitive activity. Mediation analyses indicated that volunteering was indirectly related to switching performance via cognitive activity. However, the volunteering-working memory association did not depend on activity engagement, leaving the underpinning mechanisms unclear.
Conclusions: These findings provide new insight into positive associations between older people's volunteering, activity engagement, and cognitive functioning. However, further work is needed to understand the mechanisms that drive volunteering-cognition links, and to establish causality.
Research on retirees' engagement in informal caregiving, formal volunteering, and grandparenting often views retirement as a permanent exit from the workforce. Retirement processes are, however, ...increasingly diverse: some retire fully while others remain in paid work after retirement from a career job. A relevant but understudied question is how these different retirement processes relate to changes in engagement in unpaid productive activities. Building on role theory, we hypothesize that full and working retirees face different consequences of retirement and, therefore, differ in engagement in unpaid productive activities.
We analyze data that were collected in 2015 and 2018 among 4,882 Dutch individuals aged 60-65 and employed at baseline. Around half had fully retired at follow-up and 10% worked after their retirement. At follow-up, more respondents are regularly volunteering (from 17% to 27%) and grandparenting (from 39% to 53%) than at baseline, while caregiving remains rather stable (from 33% to 30%).
Conditional change models show that full retirement is associated with an increased likelihood of volunteering and grandparenting, but not caregiving. Engagement in postretirement work is related to an increased likelihood of looking after the grandchildren, but not to volunteering or providing informal care.
Our findings suggest that volunteering is important for replacing weak ties after full retirement, while grandparenting might be a new, central role in retirement-irrespective of work engagement. Retirees seem to engage in unpaid productive activities for different reasons.
•Thresholds for increasing bird use of productive landscapes are species-specific.•Tree species richness and shrub cover are key landscape traits for bird habitat use.•Selective forestry management ...is not entirely detrimental for birds.•Intensive forestry management is unfavorable for most bird species.•Participatory approaches are needed to inform the management of communal landscapes.
Balancing the needs of increasing yields of productive systems while adhering to principles of sustainability is one of the most pressing challenges of the 21st century. However, baselines for management guidelines aimed at mitigating the impacts of working landscapes on biodiversity are lacking for the most biodiverse regions in the world. In addition, there is a scarcity of empirical examples of how information collected using community-based approaches can be used to both define management guidelines and measure outcomes for sustainability. In this study, we used bird observations collected by community monitors to identify the functional relationships between bird occupancy and habitat traits to inform management of productive landscapes. Our results indicated that relationships between bird occupancy and habitat traits depended on species residence status and their affinity to urban-cropfield areas. Percentage of shrub cover was found to significantly influence the probability of occurrence across bird species in the landscape, followed by tree diameter, tree species richness, and time since anthropogenic disturbance. Tree species richness was the only habitat trait that was found to have a positive relationship across all species groups. Seasonal variation in the number of bird species related to habitat traits was only important for shrub cover. Following our results, we identified specific management targets for current land use categories (i.e., conservation forests, forestry plots, urban-cropfield areas) to benefit birds. Overall, we concluded that selective forestry management was not entirely detrimental for birds, as it preserves habitat heterogeneity and vegetation structure. In contrast, intensive forestry management was found to be unfavorable for most bird species, likely driven by the clearing of critical vegetation from the area. Our participatory approach for defining research objectives and collecting data to directly inform management guidelines for communal lands, while using robust analytical tools, shows great potential for promoting sustainable working landscapes in biodiverse regions across the globe.
Spousal caregiving is associated with more loneliness
Grandparental caregiving and volunteering are associated with less loneliness
There is a lack of longitudinal evidence from lower- and ...middle-income countries
Older adults contribute vast amounts of care to society, yet it remains unclear how unpaid productive activities relate to loneliness. The objective of this systematic review is to synthesise the evidence for associations between midlife and older people's unpaid productive activities (i.e., spousal and grandparental caregiving, volunteering) and loneliness.
Peer-reviewed observational articles that investigated the association between loneliness and caregiving or volunteering in later life (>50 years) were searched on electronic databases (Ovid MEDLINE, Embase, PsychInfo and Global Health) from inception until July 2021. Studies were analysed using narrative synthesis and assessed for methodological quality applying the Newcastle Ottawa Scale.
A total of 28 articles from 21 countries with 191,652 participants were included (52.5% women). Results were separately discussed for the type of unpaid productive activity, namely, general caregiving (N = 10), spousal caregiving (N = 7), grandparental caregiving (N = 7), and volunteering (N = 6). Risk of bias assessments revealed a moderate to high quality of included studies. Loneliness was positively associated with spousal caregiving but negatively associated with caregiving to grandchildren and volunteering.
Grandparental caregiving and volunteering may be promising avenues for reducing loneliness in older age. Future studies will need to distinguish between different types of caregiving and volunteering and explore more complex longitudinal designs with diverse samples to investigate causal relationships with loneliness.
This study differentiated the diversified aspects of older adulthood in terms of productive activities and examined which attributes of the elderly shaped these dissimilarities of productive aging. ...This research shed light on the multi-dimensional nature of the productive activities of the Korean elderly, using the 2014 Time Use Survey produced by Statistics Korea. This study selected 3766 older adults aged 65 and older who resided in city areas. The results revealed that the time used for productive activities for older adults were different based on objective factors. These differences were clear enough to be classified into distinctive clusters. When analyzed in terms of the amount of time spent, gender of the elderly turned out to be the most discriminating factor. As for the dimension of labor, gender division of labor still existed during older adulthood in that older men were more active in doing paid work, whereas care of family was assigned as women's responsibility. Furthermore, most of the elderly did not participate in productive activities, and this possibility rose as one's age increased.
•Reveals the multi-dimensional nature of productive activities among Korean elderly.•Older adult time use is different based on objective factors.•Differences in time use can be classified into distinctive clusters.•Gender is an important factor of time use.
Objective: Social participation in daily living the activities requires the maintenance of a variety of social relationships with others and engagement in various social activities. Proper social ...participation increases the feeling of attachment, provides a stable sense of identity, and increases one’s sense of worth, belonging, and dependence on society. Lack of social participation leads to anxiety, loneliness, depression, panic, mental disorders and many other mental problems and affects society in general. A new coronavirus, called COVID-19, was identified in late December 2019 in China. After just one year, it has been reportedly infected more than 85 million people (up to January 1, 2021) worldwide, and more than 1.8 million have died. Two public health measures to break the transmission chain include quarantine and social distancing. These measures restrict gatherings or separate individuals. Due to these measures in many countries, people’s participation in many social activities has been disrupted. The purpose of this study is to survey the negative effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on home integration, community integration and productive activities. Materials & Methods: This cross-sectional study was conducted in June 2020 by using the Community Integration Questionnaire (CIQ) which measures home integration, community integration, and productive activities, along with a demographic form which were sent to 461 participants in Iran (Mean ±SD age= 36.86±5.8 years) on WhatsApp or via email and completed online. Participants were selected from among college students, patients, people with disabilities, their families and relatives, and others who could use smartphones, computers, tablets, and laptops. The effects of Covid-19 were evaluated by analyzing the CIQ scores before and after the pandemic in SPSS v. 22 software. Results: Comparing the CIQ scores before and after the pandemic, results showed that it significantly reduced home integration (P<0.0001), social integration (P<0.0001), productive activities (P<0.0001) and total score (P<0.0001). Conclusion: The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the social life of people. In addition to health threats of this disease, the fear of being infected and losing loved ones, job, educational opportunities, recreation, freedom and support, have profound psychological effects. Not only getting infected, but also the fear of getting infected can lead to a lack of access to resources that can improve people’s resistance to this disease. The COVID-19 pandemic has direct and indirect psychological and social effects and can affect mental health. In order to reduce the negative psychosocial effects of quarantine and social distancing, the implementation of national strategies to promote social participation by Information and Communication Technology-based programs is recommended.
One type of instant economic activity includes being sand miner and sand transporter in the sand mining area. The purpose of this study is to describe the impact of children's productive activities ...in the sand mine on dropout rates at the junior high school level in Keduwang Village, Blitar Regency. Respondents of the research data amounted to 38 children who carried out productive activities of sand mining. This study used cross-sectional survey research method with a quantitative approach that were supplemented with qualitative data. The collection technique used questionnaire, observation, and interviews. Data analysis techniques used descriptive data analysis techniques with the odds ratio method. The results indicate that the impact of children's productive activities in sand mining on dropout rates at junior high school level with decrease of children’s interest attending school. The results of odd ratio analysis indicate that the riskiest factor causing children to choose school dropout is productive activities in sand mining do not require special skills. The factor of not requiring special skills is proven to be six times the risk of causing children school dropout. The results provide description of how easy economic access and does not require skills has an impact on children's perceptions of going to school or working. Implications for the results of this research are expected to be a reference for government to pay attention to dropout rates that occur due to the productive activities of children in sand mining.
RESUMO Diante da importância da diversificação produtiva para o setor industrial, o presente estudo busca avaliar se o nível de diversificação da estrutura produtiva influencia na adoção de políticas ...industriais. Para tanto, utiliza-se dados de 5.570 municípios brasileiros no ano de 2015, e o método das reflexões. A abordagem das estatísticas descritivas, bem como a metodologia dos Mínimos Quadrados Ordinários (MQO) é utilizada para verificar as hipóteses testadas. Os resultados obtidos mostram que existe uma relação positiva e significante entre a Diversidade Efetiva de Atividades e a adoção de políticas industriais em todos os cenários analisados. Portanto, os resultados reforçam o argumento de que a política industrial é adotada em resposta à presença de atividades produtivas específicas, sendo condicionada pela diversificação da estrutura produtiva dos municípios.
The time older people spend on various daily activities is critical for their health and well-being. New generations of older adults are increasingly expected to participate in ‘active’ activities. ...We explore shifts in active time use among upcoming cohorts of older people in Sweden. Recognizing the diverging meanings associated with the active ageing concept, we develop a classification model comprising the spheres of work, social engagement, and active leisure. We observe differences in time use of the ‘older middle-aged’ (pre-retirement), ‘young old’, and ‘older old’ observed in 2000/2001 and 2010/2011. We draw on two cross sections of Swedish time-use survey data covering 120 activities related to people’s everyday lives. We measure between-cohort differences in mean time use and employ covariate analysis to control for the influence of group-wise changes in socio-demographics. Linear regression is used to explore social differentiation, e.g. the influence of gender. Comparisons between new and previous generations indicate substantial increases in overall active ageing activity: increases by 7 h per week among the older old and 3.5 h among the young old and older middle-aged. New generations spend more time on work, paid or unpaid, and leisure digital interaction; for some, this is counteracted by less free time spent on social engagement. The new generation of the older old group spends more time on outdoor activity and exercise. These time-use patterns are gendered and dependent on education, mainly due to changes in cohort composition.
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