Abstract
Highly social activities like leisure and tourism are considered to have positive effects on the elderly’s mental health. Taking Japan as a case study, this research aims to clarify how leisure and tourism contribute to the elderly’s quality of life (QOL) in the domains of leisure and intimacy by comparing populated and depopulated areas. Such research has strong implications for achieving Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) through healthy aging, but relevant efforts are quite limited. In this study, leisure and tourism behaviors are captured by visit frequency, travel party and expenditure. Quality of life is measured by happiness and life satisfaction in different life domains, in line with the life-oriented approach. Data were collected in 2014 via a nationwide online survey in Japan. Applying a structural equation model (SEM) approach, it is found that leisure behavior contributes to maintaining the elderly’s QOL in leisure life and intimacy domains. Tourism behavior only contributes to QOL in populated areas. Leisure activities strongly enhance QOL in terms of intimacy and improve the neighborhood relationship of the elderly in depopulated areas and family life in populated areas. Enriching daily leisure activities for the elderly would improve their intimate relationships in depopulated areas.
Highlights
Between 2015 and 2050, the ratio of people aged 60+ in the world will double [1]
The different findings from the depopulated areas provide an important warning message against tourism development for the elderly in depopulated areas. This advances the leisure and tourism research, because the results show that tourism is not always an enhancement for elderly people’s Quality of Life (QOL)
For the effects on QOL in intimacy, the connection between friends and neighbors in depopulated areas is closer than in populated areas; neighbors are more familiar with each other compared to the elderly living in large cities, which may explain why the neighborhood domain is more important in QOL in intimacy
Summary
Between 2015 and 2050, the ratio of people aged 60+ in the world will double [1]. Such an aging trend is especially remarkable in developed countries. Like many other developed countries, aging and depopulation in the peripheral areas have become the urgent social problems in Japan and relevant for Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) [1,3,4,5]. In this regard, elderly care has attracted public attention, especially in terms of health-related Quality of Life (QOL) and social care [6,7]. Quality of life is often used as a set of comprehensive indicators to measure the current situations of people’s lives. With discretionary time and disposable income, elderly people are more willing to participate in leisure and tourism activities [12], and elderly people’s leisure life domain becomes the main conduit for social activities
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