From passive to active consumers? Later life consumption in the UK from 1968–2005

The significance of the UK's ageing population has been generally acknowledged, however its implications for consumption have been neglected. The consumption patterns of older people are important given that the end of the 20^th century witnessed profound changes to the nature of later life, many linked to the emergence of 'consumer societies' in the UK and elsewhere. The uneven nature of retirement, as well as the relative affluence of many retired people, has important effects on patterns and experiences of consumption. This paper charts consumption by retired households in two areas; ownership of key consumer goods and key components of household spending. We investigate how these expenditure trends compare with other household types and across pseudo-birth cohorts. We draw data from 9 years of the Family Expenditure Survey taken at 5 year intervals between 1968 and 2004/5. The data demonstrate the growing extent of ownership of key goods in retired households but also show the differences in proportional expenditure between retired households and the employed. We also note differences between pseudo-birth cohorts and conclude that consumption patterns in later life are influenced by the generational habitus of the differing cohorts who entered retirement between the 1960s and the present day.     

Time-use auditing: An approach to validating social indicators

Following McCal,, ‘quality of life’ is defined as objective social conditions necessary to the general happiness, where ‘happiness’ is understood in the broad sense, as including all forms of intrinsically valuable experience, not just ‘feeling happy’. The argument is then made that in order for this definition to be fully implemented happiness in the broad sense must also be assessed. The latter half of the paper is devoted to describing a set of procedures, collectively called ‘time-use auditing’, for determining the extent to which an individual person is happy, in the broad sense, in a stated interval of time. Intrinsically valuable experience is analyzed into two dimensions: duration and level. The first is determined by time-budgeting and the second (in a general way) by Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Specifically, Maslow's hierarchy is spelled out in concrete terms by means of “time-use rating structures’, each one specific to a particular time-use category; the authors have written rating structures for adolescents of either sex, ages 12 to 17 inclusive. By way of illustration, an audit of three weeks in the life of a 16-year-old girl is presented. The paper concludes with a discussion of what remains to be done, with special stress on writing time-use rating structures for other age groups and modifying structures already in existence to reflect the values of particular social groups.     

Regularised Manova for High‐Dimensional Data

The traditional and readily available multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) tests such as Wilks' Lambda and the Pillai–Bartlett trace start to suffer from low power as the number of variables approaches the sample size. Moreover, when the number of variables exceeds the number of available observations, these statistics are not available for use. Ridge regularisation of the covariance matrix has been proposed to allow the use of MANOVA in high‐dimensional situations and to increase its power when the sample size approaches the number of variables. In this paper two forms of ridge regression are compared to each other and to a novel approach based on lasso regularisation, as well as to more traditional approaches based on principal components and the Moore‐Penrose generalised inverse. The performance of the different methods is explored via an extensive simulation study. All the regularised methods perform well; the best method varies across the different scenarios, with margins of victory being relatively modest. We examine a data set of soil compaction profiles at various positions relative to a ridgetop, and illustrate how our results can be used to inform the selection of a regularisation method.     

Activities and social contact as antecedents to sleep onset time in U.S. adolescents

This study evaluated adolescents' evening patterns in activities, social contact, and location to better understand antecedents to adolescents' sleep onset time (SOT). The SOT is important for sleep duration and related health outcomes. Using a nationally representative sample of 15- to 18-year-old adolescents from the American Time Use Survey (N = 10,341; 47% female; 57% white), structural equation modeling demonstrated that late SOTs mediated links between evening activities, social contact, locations, and shorter sleep durations. Passive leisure, time in public locations, and time with friends late in the evenings were associated with later SOTs, whereas homework and active leisure did not. Parents and practitioners can use this information to carefully evaluate evening activities, social contact, and location to support healthy SOTs for adolescents across time.