Non-paid Activities Research Articles

Activities and Cognitive Health among Native Hawaiian Older Adults.

The number of older adults aged 65 and older in Hawaiʻi has been increasing (Administration for Community Living, 2021). With this, there are growing concerns on issues with cognitive impairment and related diseases. Native Hawaiians (NHs) experience health disparities related to high risk of cardiovascular conditions, which are known to be risk factors of cognition (Ganbat & Wu, 2021). NHs are disproportionately affected by dementia and subjective cognitive decline (Alzheimer’s Association, 2021; Ganbat & Wu, 2021). In 2020, 29,000 people aged 65 and older had Alzheimer’s in Hawaiʻi, and this number is expected to increase to 35,000 by 2025 (Alzheimer’s Association, 2021). Productive activities and leisure activities have been linked to positive health outcomes in older adults. Yet, less is known if these beneficial effects extend to NH older adults. This article identifies the associations between various activities and cognitive health among this population. This study is guided by the productive aging framework (Morrow-Howell et al., 2001). Productive activities are paid or nonpaid activities performed by older adults that bring social benefits (Hooyman et al., 2017). A growing body of literature suggests the cognitive health benefits of these productive activities and other leisure activities. In addition to strength-based approaches to productive aging, research about Kanaka Maoli (NHs) has focused on social constructs regarding space, place, and self-identity (Yeh et al., 2021) as factors with impacts on the social habits of their kūpuna (older adults). Among these, the ecological model for NH well-being (McGregor et al., 2003) discusses concepts from the Hawaiian language such as ʻāina (land), aloha (love/compassion), kuleana (responsibility/role), lōkahi (unity/balance/harmony), mālama (to care for someone or something), and ʻohana (family). This model focuses on access to land and organization of the family (McGregor & MacKenzie, 2014), as well-being is linked to natural resources for both subsistence and cultural practices.

After retirement what next? A survey of post-retirement resolutions of retiring university teachers in Ghana

ABSTRACT This research examined the decisions of retiring university teachers to continue work after retirement in the same profession or leave for other employment or non-paid activities. The study used a questionnaire to collect data from 231 respondents purposively drawn from 20 Ghanaian public universities. Analyses of the data revealed that most respondents resolved to leave their current profession when they retired because they preferred to engage in either part-time self-employment or part-time non-paid social activities. The minority stayers were motivated to mentor inexperienced others, keep an active life, and maintain income earnings but mainly on a part-time basis. The research is impactful because workforce aging has become a global higher education issue, particularly for managers who reflect on how to fill vacancies with competent replacements.

Activities of degrowth and political change

Hannah Arendt's three-fold conceptualization of human activity offers a useful base for understanding the necessity of degrowth and the kinds of activities required to achieve it. The article argues that the different roles of labour, work, and action should be acknowledged and scrutinized in detail to appreciate the underpinnings of contemporary over-production and over-consumption, as well as to prompt the organization of an alternative society. While following the Arendtian analysis on the origins of meaningful political change, which emphasizes the utmost importance of ‘action’, the article also underscores the importance of a different conception of ‘labour’ through physical activity, such as community supported agriculture, and ‘work’ through social activity such as building off-grid energy systems. The study aligns itself with Arendt's key insight that the origin of most contemporary problems relates to the disappearance of ‘action’, which for her is political, but also argues that the distinction between ‘paid’ and ‘non-paid’ activity has to be carefully considered in the context of degrowth. The article concludes that non-paid activities, particularly in the form of Arendtian ‘action’, have great potential to contribute to the degrowth movement. Demonetized activities are important for degrowth, as monetary transactions in capitalist societies based on interest and debt tend to contribute to economic growth, which is deemed ecologically unsustainable.

Concepts, Determinants and Household Consumption of Time Poverty: Evidence from Ghana

This paper discusses time poverty (well-being) of the individual and puts it in the Ghanaian perspective. The paper examine hours adults as well as children allocate to work. The paper measured time poverty from the Ghanaian context. Using the Ghana Living Standard Survey, round six (GLSS, 6) and employing OLS, Logit and Quantile analysis, interesting and intriguing results are presented. The paper found females (both adult and young) to be more time poor individuals and engages in household or non-paid activities than their counterpart males. The paper further found education and time poverty to be positively associated. Results suggest that traditionally, females are noted for time poor than males but as one moves up on the education ladder, the demand to work more increases. This has implication for health issues.

The Work and Work Systems of Patients: A New Frontier for Macroergonomics in Health Care

To maintain and improve their health, patients perform many non-paid activities that may be conceptualized as self-care and self-management work. However, within the domain of health care, macroergonomists have almost exclusively focused on analyzing the work and work systems of those employed by the health care system rather than those served by it. This panel will focus on how macroergonomics principles and models originally developed within an institutional context may be adapted for the contexts in which patients are embedded. The discussion will be grounded in specific analyses of patients’ work and work systems within domains such as consumer health information technology design, self-care work performance, transitions of care, and patient safety. During each of these presentations, panelists will focus on lessons related to the conceptual, methodological and practice-related challenges of understanding and affecting patients’ work and work systems that may be applied by other researchers.

Hoe gezond is werken?

How healthy is working? How healthy is working? This article aims at gaining more insight in the effect of labour market participation on health in the Dutch context. The positive relation between labour market participation and health has often been emphasized in the policy discussions. However, existing research insufficiently takes into account the reciprocal relationship between labour market participation and health. In this article, we control for the role of background variables which are likely to influence both labour market participation and health by using panel techniques. We use data from the Dutch Labour Supply Panel (formerly called ‘OSA Work Supply Panel’). We find that the statement that ‘work is good for your health’ should be nuanced. Our results show that the effect of labour market participation on health is dependent on characteristics of the individual, weekly working time, job characteristics, and non-paid activities and the possibility to combine those with paid work, and available types of non-work.

Paid Advertising In Question: Do Non-Paid Facebook Efforts Effectively Foster Sales?

Our research studies if paid advertising in social media and non-paid activities (likes, comments, news feed impressions) are an effective tool for customer acquisition (new customer sales) or if they rather help retain existing customers in the loop and induce them to repeated purchases (existing customer sales). We gather actual field data of the advertising efforts of a leading online retailer in Facebook and apply a direct aggregation approach which includes short and long-term effects and synergies to analyze the impact on sales. We also compare the effect of different activities for different customer groups. We find that engagement in Facebook actually pays out, but it is rather non-paid activities that influence sales. Furthermore we find that customer groups react very differently to advertising in this medium, which offers a solution to the prior controversy on this topic. Our results offer details on how each customer group should be approached. In general it can be concluded that the quality and not the quantity of engagement plays the more important role and that privacy concerns should be considered.

The interface between health systems and vertical programmes in Francophone Africa: the managers’ perceptions

To explores the interface between vertical programmes (VPs) and general health services (GHS) in sub-Saharan Africa. Using semi-structured interviews, we analysed the perceptions of a selection of experienced mid-level managers of health systems and of VP originating in francophone Africa on the nature and quality of this interface. The respondents acknowledged that VPs lead to both positive and negative effects on the functioning of GHS. The overall result, however, cannot be viewed as a simple summation of the positive effects possibly compensating for the negative ones. Indeed, some of the negative effects have a profound impact on the management and operation of the health care delivery system and may undermine the long-term institutional capacity of the general health systems. The quality and the nature of the interface between VP and GHS strongly vary in time, between settings and programmes. We argue for more systematic monitoring of the interface between VP and GHS, so as to identify and address, in a timely manner, significant disruptive effects and deficiencies in a perspective of systemic capacity building of health systems.

Domesticating home anchored work: Negotiating flexibility when bringing ICT based work home in rural communities

Based on a study of people conducting ICT based work from home in Scotland and Norway, the article analyses how work is negotiated and integrated with non-paid activities in the household and local community. The article fills a gap in that it focuses on rural contexts rather than the urban work life often depicted in literature on flexibility and work. When work is brought home, a domestication process takes place whereby practices of work are negotiated and integrated into everyday life, sometimes changing common perceptions of where and when work is “in” or “out of place”. While working from home is common in rural areas, the study shows that ICT based knowledge related work is still seen as relatively “out of place”. Drawing on the domestication concept, the study shows how community norms about accessibility, interaction and where to be at certain times, had to be renegotiated when this type of work was conducted from home. Imbued in these negotiations were subtly often tacitly communicated moral conceptions on what constitutes good parenthood (in particular motherhood) as well as “real” work. Both men and women reported benefits in terms of combining family and work obligations when working from home, but the tendency was still for traditional gender patterns to be reproduced. Women tended to fit work around the needs of the children, whereas men saw themselves first and foremost workers. Following the concept “doing gender” some challenged these patterns, but did so carefully in relation to the work organisation as well as the community. The impact of communities in regulating home anchored work suggests there may be a need for communities to take on a more active domestication process as more people conduct ICT based work with the home as the base, opening up the moral and normative geographies for when work is “in” or “out of place”.

Die Halbtagsgesellschaft – ein Konzept für nachhaltigere Produktions- und Konsummuster Die Halbtagsgesellschaft – ein Konzept für nachhaltigere Produktions- und Konsummuster

Achieving a sustainable development involves many challenges. For Germany, this is true for ecological as well as social and economic aspects of development. Unemployment, an ageing society, national budget deficits, and environmental concerns are significant problems that can hardly be solved by traditional concepts alone. This study introduces a socio-economic input-output model focused on human activity patterns. Time use, monetary value, and CO2 emissions generated by the production and consumption of goods and services relating to these activities are analyzed for three age groups (i.e. youth, adults, senior citizens). Not only paid work, but also non-paid activities such as household chores, care for children and elderly people, and community services are taken into consideration.Based on the time patterns, monetary values, and CO2 emissions in Germany 1998, the paper presents the concept of a part-time society characterized by a reduction of paid work time and an increase in social engagement. Initial model results suggest that production and consumption patterns of the part-time society fulfil the criteria of sustainable development for the social, ecological, and economic dimensions as specified by the Agenda 21.

The “Ground War” of Political Campaigns: Nonpaid Activities in U.S. State Legislative Races

A national survey of candidates for state legislative offices examined the impact of nonpaid campaign activities on percentage of vote obtained, and assesses them in the contexts of different levels of funding, levels of competitiveness, and incumbency advantage. From a representative sample of 527 candidates, several insights emerge. First, while incumbency is a powerful force, a wide array of nonpaid campaign activities can substantially influence election outcome. Second, while some forms of free media coverage are quite risky, endorsements from community leaders and in newspaper editorials are consistently beneficial at this level. Finally, traditional campaigning, like door-to-door canvassing, is very much alive and well in state legislative races.

Correlates of Voluntary vs. Involuntary Part‐time Employment among US Women

This article presents a study of the extent to which type and duration of labour force attachment add to the explanatory power of psychological, demographic, and family household characteristics to predict voluntary (n=166) vs. involuntary part‐time (n=160) employment of women in the United States. We use the terms ‘voluntary’ and ‘involuntary’ to reflect the woman's choice in accepting to work in paid part‐time employment. In this context, voluntary part‐time work is not meant to be construed as charitable, non‐paid activities, but rather is construed as individuals who are working part‐time but who would prefer to be working full‐time, if a suitable job were available. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Labor Market Experience (NLSLME), we found that labour market attachment characteristics added little to predict part‐time employment status (involuntary vs. voluntary) and had virtually no effect on the odds of any other correlates on employment status. The major exception was number of years of unemployment. The longer working women were previously unemployed, the greater the likelihood they were involuntarily employed in part‐time jobs. In addition, we found that marriage and private sector employment decreased the likelihood of involuntary part‐time employment.Findings suggest that involuntarily part‐time employed women appear to be ‘settling’ for what they can get, namely, part‐time rather than full‐time jobs and that unmarried part‐timers may be viewed as a stigmatized or marginal group more likely to be employed in the public rather than private sector. Policy implications and future research are discussed.

News Coverage, Endorsements and Personal Campaigning: The Influence of Non-Paid Activities in Congressional Elections

This study examines the influence of traditional, nonpaid campaign activities—news coverage, endorsements and personal campaigning—on election outcome by polling congressional winners and losers. Results argue that non-paid activities affect both outcome and percent of votes received. For incumbents, appearances before small groups enhanced vote percentages. For non-incumbents, external endorsements and editorial support from print and broadcast media were positively related to voter response. Evidence indicates that incumbents and challengers use different strategies … and that challengers have something to learn from incumbents.