Retirement Rhythms: Retirees’ Management of Time and Activities in Denmark

Aske Juul Lassen, Kenneth Mertz, Lars Holm and Astrid Pernille Jespersen
Additional contact information
Aske Juul Lassen: Center for Health Research in the Humanities, Saxo_Institute, University of Copenhagen, 2300 Copenhagen, Denmark
Kenneth Mertz: Institute of Sports Medicine, Department of Orthopaedic Surgery M, Bispebjerg Hospital, 2400 Copenhagen, Denmark
Lars Holm: School of Sport, Exercise and Rehabilitation Sciences, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham B15 2TT, UK
Astrid Pernille Jespersen: Center for Health Research in the Humanities, Saxo_Institute, University of Copenhagen, 2300 Copenhagen, Denmark

Societies, 2020, vol. 10, issue 3, 1-16

Abstract: We scrutinize how the everyday lives of well-educated and healthy Danish retirees are structured and experienced and study how they organise their days and weeks. Our aim is to investigate how retirees manage and organise time and the ways these relate to societal rhythms in order to contribute to theories of retirement and social gerontology. We have combined qualitative (individual interviews, focus group interviews, design games, and drawings) and quantitative (activity monitoring, sleep quality, and health markers) data from 13 participants over the age of 65 years, who are research participants in a randomised controlled trial (RCT). Our interdisciplinary dataset allows us to analyse and compare subjective experiences of everyday activities with objective measures of daily activities. The older adults lead busy lives with many diverse activities and use these to structure their everyday lives in ways resembling the rhythms of the labour market with organised and busy mornings and loose afternoons and evenings. We discuss how our findings relate to continuity theory and suggest that Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis allows us to study the retirement rhythms of older adults as part of both biological, social, and societal rhythms. This has practical as well as conceptual implications.

Keywords: theories of retirement; rhythmanalysis; management of time; interdisciplinary gerontology; busy ethic; societal rhythms (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A13 A14 P P0 P1 P2 P3 P4 P5 Z1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4698/10/3/68/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4698/10/3/68/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsoctx:v:10:y:2020:i:3:p:68-:d:414103

Access Statistics for this article

Societies is currently edited by Ms. Farrah Sun

More articles in Societies from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().