Although there have been a diversity of approaches to successful aging, they can fall into three categories: physical health, a personal psychological aspect and family and social relations. This paper takes a look at maintaining social activities, ha...
Although there have been a diversity of approaches to successful aging, they can fall into three categories: physical health, a personal psychological aspect and family and social relations. This paper takes a look at maintaining social activities, having positive interactions, acquiring social usefulness through voluntary service, and having harmonious relations with family and society. In order to lead a life with these elements well maintained, it is necessary to allot life time to the four areas evenly and keep the balance.
The existing studies in relation to this revealed that the balance between labor and leisure has a key importance on mental and physical health. If an old person spends too much time on work, compared with time on leisure, or if it is the other way around, it causes occupational unbalance. The occupational unbalance worsens health and the quality of life, like enough to cause harm or illness. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to look at the balance of work through old people’s life time, verity the factors that determine the balance to provide basic data for determining policies for old people’s health increase and public health.
Since old people’s life time is social time, it is temporal quality that reveals a society’s important value system and that makes it possible to give a close-up view of mutual relations between important social activities and of the organizational forms. This social time bears close relationship with humans’ work and can be classified into 4 kinds according to the degree of concentration of time that is allotted to the human work. The first is a type of daily life: activities are conducted centering on daily life owing to narrow social participation and relationship. The second is a type of excessive leisure: too much time is allotted to leisure. The third is a type of excessive work (labor): too much time is allotted to labor. The final is a type of occupational balance: there is an appropriate balance between each domain of the work. This paper uses these elements as dependent variables to find the causality that determine the type of work.
This paper uses 2004 Life Time Survey by the Statistics Korea as the raw resource to classify the types of work done by old people and conduct a Multinomial Logit Regression in order to identify the factors that influence these types. This analysis, based on statistically significant variables, comes to the following conclusion. First, the type of excessive leisure is more likely to be found in old people who are male, of older age and have religion and higher-education experience; it is less likely to be found in those who work on weekdays. Second, old people whose spouse works are more likely to belong to the type of excessive labor than the type of daily life, and this type is more likely to be found on weekdays; old people who are male and of older age are less likely to. Third, old people whose spouse works and who have religion, higher-education experience and works to do are more likely to belong to the type of occupational balance; those who are male and of older age are less likely to.
The problem of old people, in an aging society, has become a nationally important issue. Recently, a variety of policies have been developed and proposed at the national level. However, they have less practicality. This is because the policies have been developed not on the basis of real life of old people. Therefore, it is necessary to develop life-style redesign programs and policies on the basis of occupational balance.