Sustaining life satisfaction and worthwhileness in older age: the role of diversity of social and leisure activity engagement

Abstract

Adapting to health changes helps sustain wellbeing in later life. Life satisfaction and worthwhileness of life are both monitored by the UK government; worthwhileness is under-researched. Motivated by Selection, Optimisation and Compensation theory, we investigated whether greater diversity of social and leisure activity engagement mediates relationships between self-assessed health and both life satisfaction and worthwhileness. To inform policy and practice, we also investigated whether mediation effects varied between different sub-groups of older people, including young-old vs older-old; retirees vs non-retirees and more vs less physically active. Structural Equation Modelling on a large sample of England-resident adults aged 50+ (n = 9,395) found greater diversity of social and leisure activity engagement partially mediated the total effect of self-assessed health on life satisfaction and worthwhileness. Mediation was greater for worthwhileness than for life satisfaction and greatest for retirees. These results suggest that encouraging older people to engage with more diverse types of social and leisure activity should be considered when designing policies and programmes to increase older peoples’ wellbeing. These findings add to the relatively sparse literature on correlates of the Office for National Statistics’ worthwhileness measure of personal wellbeing.