A Study on the Leisure Lifestyles, Serious Leisure and Successful Aging for the Middle-aged and the Elders – The Case of Taichung City

• Main Authors: You-Hong Lin, 林祐鋐
• Other Authors: Wen-Tsann Yang
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2019
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/tjq4s8

博士 === 逢甲大學 === 土木水利工程與建設規劃博士學位學程 === 107 === The purposes of this study were to discuss the mutual relationships among the middle-aged and elders’ leisure lifestyles, serious leisure and successful aging as well as the contribution and effect of leisure lifestyle, serious leisure to successful aging. The study respondents were citizens of Taichung city, who are 55 years old or older. Convenient sampling approach was applied for a questionnaire survey and 552 valid questionnaires were collected for data analyses by using the SPSS.20 as statistical tool to conduct study hypotheses tests. Based on the results of the data analysis, it was found that 4 factors of leisure lifestyle were obtained, including: "daily life at home", "leisure and travel", "life of information" and "health care"; and 3 factors of serious leisure, including: "durable benefits", "perseverance", and "sub-culture"; and 5 factors of successful aging, including: "spiritual well-being", "life adaptation", "economic security", "social relationships" and "health autonomy". Leisure lifestyles of different age levels presented significant differences in the factor of "life of information" and those of the age level of 55-60 years old were greater than that of 66-70 years old. Different retirement situations have significant differences in the factor of "leisure and travel" and those of the retired were greater than that in employment. The different retirement status of has a significant difference in the factor of "perseverance" in serious leisure and those who were retired had higher perception of "perseverance" than those in employment. Different genders had significant differences in the factors of "economic security" and "social relationships" of successful aging. Two groups of lifestyles were obtained after the cluster analysis, including: the "pragmatic" and "optimistic" styles. The optimistic lifestyle respondents had significantly more positive towards 5 factors of successful aging than the pragmatic lifestyle ones, which may indicate that the optimistic lifestyle respondents may consequently lead to successful aging. The Pearson product-moment correlation analysis showed that the mutual correlations of leisure lifestyle, serious leisure and successful aging have shown significantly positive correlations, which may indicate that these three types of variables contributed one another in a mutual assistant relationship. The multiple regression analysis was conducted to further explain the contributions of leisure lifestyle and serious leisure significantly affected successful aging with explained variance of 38.1% and 37.8%, respectively; and even up to 46% if combined leisure lifestyle and serious leisure together to affect successful aging. According to the study results, three conclusions were reached, including: (1) leisure activity participations may lead to both physical and mental fitness, and serious leisure may be assistant to reach successful aging; (2) personal interesting and activity contents of leisure lifestyle may be helpful to reach successful aging; (3)both leisure lifestyles and serious leisure may affect successful aging process. Consequently, some suggestions were also presented for the references of government policy making, including: (1) governments’ policies may be focused on the forming of leisure lifestyles of middle aged and elders; (2) governments may provide senior citizens with leisure education programs to help them plan their retirement; (3) middle aged and elders should emphasize on life long learning with public resources to improve their retirement; (4) the era of super aging society would be resulted in many new study issues, such as: the role of serious leisure in forming leisure lifestyles, the benefit evaluation of serious leisure in successful aging and so on, which can be referred to for future studies.