An Empirical Study on the Patterns of Elderly Leisure Activities and their Effects on Life Satisfaction

노인의 여가활동 유형과 여가활동이 생애만족도에 미치는 효과에 관한 연구

This paper has two purposes. the one was to find empirical patterns of rural and urban elderly's leisure activities, and the other was to test the effects of elderly's leisure activities on life satisfaction. the data were collected for 319 respondents aged over 50s who resided in Jeonbuk rural and urban areas. Through exploratory factor analysis, we found ten patterns of leisure activities. In addition, we conducted multiple regression analysis to test net effects of those leisure activities on life satisfaction. the results indicate that even no one pattern of leisure activities significantly influences the elderly's life satisfaction, controlling for social correlates (consisted of social structural, family relationship, personality, and socio-economic demographic variables). Rather, the respondent's level of health, level of economic status, and positive relationship with adult children have significant net effects on respondent's life satisfaction. This result suggests that the positive relationship between leisure activities and life satisfaction in the existing empirical studies might be spurious. We recommend that the further studies should conduct survey and analyze the data for affluent elderly residing in more urbanized areas.