Time use studies: A method for exploring everyday life in the Third Age.

Activity patterns after retirement have always constituted a theme of central interest for social gerontology. However, despite the recent theoretical focus on the emergence of the Third Age as a period of self-fulfilment and an ongoing engagement with an active leisure lifestyle after retirement, sociology's knowledge regarding everyday life in older ages remains limited as there is a dearth of social surveys on how older people spend their time. Furthermore, the majority of existing studies on the topic rely on data from conventional interviewer-administered questionnaire surveys that do not provide a holistic account of everyday activities and also have certain methodological weaknesses. Few studies capitalize on data from time-use surveys, which currently constitute the most widely employed and accurate methodology for collecting information on daily activities. The aim of this chapter is to introduce time-use methodology to researchers in the field of aging and to discuss the contributions that analyses of time-use data can bring in the field of social gerontology in the era of the Third Age. The first part of the chapter reviews the basic methodological aspects of time-use surveys and provides a discussion of their advantages over alternative methods of data collection on individuals' time allocation. In the second part an example of a time-use analysis is provided: British data from 2000 are analyzed to examine the socio-demographic correlates of participation in ‘active’ and ‘passive’ leisure activities for people over the age of 64