Ep. 32: The Social Science of Recreation and Aging with Dr. Candace Brown

2:18PM Dec 12, 2022

Speakers:

Dr. Ian Anson

Campus Connections

Alex Andrews

Dr. Candace Brown

Keywords:

people

exercise

umbc

motivation

physical activity

gerontology

important

life

understand

talking

triathlon

survey

research

pickleball

older

sport

women

social science

black women

person

Ah Hello and welcome to Retrieving the Social Sciences, a production of the Center for Social Science Scholarship. I'm your host, Ian Anson, Associate Professor of Political Science here at UMBC. On today's show, as always, we'll be hearing from UMBC faculty, students, visiting speakers, and community partners about the social science research they've been performing in recent times. Qualitative, quantitative, applied, empirical, normative. On Retrieving the Social Sciences we bring the best of you UMBC's social science community to you.

One of the most curious social phenomena that I've noticed over the past several years is one that involves a ball, some squarish paddles, and a controversially repurposed tennis court. Yes, I'm sure some of you have a good idea of what I'm talking about, because there are probably people in your lives, who have become utterly obsessed with this neophyte sport or a game or recreational addiction or whatever you want to call it. Of course, I'm talking about pickleball. And it seems like everywhere I go, especially when I'm back at home in Cary, North Carolina, folks are talking about improving their serves and getting better at backhands wherever I am. As it turns out, pickleball is especially beloved by seniors, a population that often has lots of free time and a healthy interest in trying out new recreational activities. But as people age, some might find themselves falling in love with pickleball or swimming or walking or any number of enjoyable active endeavors, while others become increasingly sedentary. The health risks of a sedentary lifestyle are grave, even for people earlier in life. So the social science of elderly recreation is hugely important for this growing demographic. And while I still don't have any idea how to play pickleball thankfully, UMBC recently welcomed a top notch social scientist who can tell us all about the social science of recreation among the elderly. Dr. Candace Brown is an assistant professor of Gerontology in the Department of Public Health Sciences at the University of North Carolina Charlotte, as well as a member of the Gerontology executive committee. Dr. Brown's work spans the field of gerontology, but especially focuses on the lived experiences of elderly black Americans as they navigate aging amidst the harmful effects of stereotypes and unique social pressures. I'm really excited to bring you this rebroadcast of Dr. Brown's remarks at the Social Sciences Forum, Erickson School of Aging lecture, a production of the Erickson School and the Center for Social Science Scholarship.

Here's a little presentation overview about what I'm going to talk about today. And you know, as I began my journey into research, the one thing that always stuck with me was the fact that I love to exercise and that I've been an exerciser my entire life. And gerontology is something that I've been into because my father had actually encouraged me as 14 year old to go to a nursing home and to volunteer. Because initially, I thought I wanted to be a medical doctor. And one of the things that really stuck with me when I was in that nursing home was the fact that there were so many people that were immobile, right. There was frailty there. People weren't not able to take care of themselves the way they wanted to. And I understood that part of that reason why was because they were not exercising regularly. So that's why I like to study exercising, because I'd like to see, what are we able to do through the lifespan, and what actually motivates some people to continue exercising into their 80s and into their 90s. So study actually the motivation to exercise. So we start like the girls on the left in the picture here, right? We start out by exercising, but we just don't call kids you know. We call it playing. And we go outside, and we have fun. And it's not a task. And even when we were, you know, in elementary school, everybody, just about everybody, loved PE class, not just because you were going to get a chance to get out of sitting down and having to listen to your teacher talk about something that you probably weren't interested in because you didn't know how important it was going to be later in life. But there was this opportunity for us to move around and to expend energy. And as we get older, you know, you'll hear people say, oh, man, I wish I had the energy of kids. And sometimes we try to find that in a bottle of caffeine in one way or another but it's just not the same. And so I know also that my parents, you know, especially my mom served as a role model for me for exercise. I remember when she used to put in the Jane Fonda tapes, and I would hear Olivia Newton John's "Let's Get Physical" and I knew that it meant we were going to exercise. Of course I did not know that's not what the song is talking about until I was much older. But that's not the point. The point is, it was fun. And exercise just didn't seem like it was exercise when I was younger. And so, you know, what happens to us as we get older? You know, and and why is it that some of us just stop exercising? When we think about exercise, the benefits of physical activity are well established. So Healthy People 2020. It's a science based 10 year national objective that's created by the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion. And they're meant to be put together for the promotion and health of all Americans. And it's designed to increase the number of Americans who actually meet certain physical activity needs. And these guidelines that you can see here, you know, give us an opportunity to say, You know what, this is a goal for me, maybe I can exercise 150 to 300 minutes per week. It seems like a lot, when you really break it down to the fact that we have seven days a week that we can do this, it is very plausible to do it. Now, what you do need to understand is that exercise is actually a subset of physical activity. So you'll hear people say, I'm physically active, but that might not necessarily mean that they're exercising. Exercising is a planned structured, repetitive movement that occurs, there is a final and intermediate objective that somebody wants to meet. And it's for the maintenance of physical fitness. Most research to date has focused on midlife to older adults and older black women, older vets. When I say midlife, I'm talking about people who are 45. And older, when I'm talking about people who are 65. And older, those are older people that I mean, right. And these trends that we see often are focused on certain groups. And then the trends that we see sometimes aren't focused on groups. So I like to look at the groups that probably aren't looked at in a positive way. And I like to call it positive reinforcement positive research, because a lot of times, we will hear about the negative research that comes out and all the negative things are said, but there are people who are doing things that are positive. And those are the people that I like to, to promote, so to speak, because I don't know one day, I probably want to be like them. So with 54% and 32 and 23.2% of older adults actually achieving the recommended minutes of physical activity. Remember, we said that's 150 to 300 minutes. And then also doing muscle strengthening exercises like lifting weights. Behavioral Research is actually sought to understand what actually motivates these people to exercise. Why are you out here doing this? Much of the research that has done in the past, again, has been negative. And sometimes it's because of the interventions, right? People will be a part of a research intervention where they will increase their asks. But after the intervention is over, if those researchers go back, and they ask the people, you know, are you continuing this exercise that you had been doing for the last 12 weeks? A lot of times that they'll say no. And of course, there are myriad reasons why that happens. Sometimes it has to do with transportation, sometimes it has to do with cost and maybe not being able to afford a certain gym and going there and exercising. Sometimes it has to do with the atmosphere and the people you're around the social support you get. And so what I'm hoping to do, like as I keep going into this career, is to be able to understand what it is that helps us stay motivated during those times where everything isn't perfectly like we would see in an intervention. In 2016. You see here we got 44.4% of us black women met the national guidelines and women black women comprise 13% of women in the United States, but also constitute 52% of women who are inactive.

Very important to me, because I'm a black woman, which just makes sense. So what motivation, motivation is simply defined as the direction and intensity of one's effort. It's self initiated for direction and sustainability leaning towards a goal. Now, it might not be necessarily self directed initially. Right? But in order to continue exercising and to do it, well, the motivation has to come inside. That's what we call intrinsic motivation. Right. So since exercise has to be intentional and exercise is something that is repetitive, right? And it is something that is planned properly. ation for the exercise has to be intentional also, you just don't fall into exercise. Thus the behavioral construct of motivation is principal to understanding why people choose to exercise, motivation to participate in exercise or in specifically some type of sport has come from has been drawn from a wide array of different theoretical perspectives, right. So, the theory that I like to use is the self determination theory. It is this huge macro theory of human motivation that addresses issues such as self regulation, psychological needs, life goals, aspirations, energy, vitality, and other issues that are related to well being in life domains. It specifically determines how behavior determines both personal choice, which is that intrinsic motivation or internal motivation, and then outside influence, which is the extrinsic motivation or external motivation, therefore, allowing for an examination of different effects of motivation altogether. When considering why people choose to exercise, or to participate in physical activity with others, I like to use different surveys and unders to understand both their motivations and sometimes those barriers which come to hinder us from being able to exercise. I have used the motivation for marathoner scale and actually transformed it to be used for triathletes. This scale has also been cyclists and use for swimmers. It's been used for people who Golf is a great scale and a great survey to use when you just want to understand motivation for sport in different ways. The reason why it's so good is because it looks at nine different points of view, including health orientation, weight, concern, personal goal achievement, competition, recognition, filiation, psychological coping, life meeting and self esteem. So it looks at a whole host of things to try to understand what actually motivates a person to exercise. There's also the short form SF 36, which is the physical function subscale. And this is a 10 Questions survey that asks whether or not the present health of someone actually limit ability to perform some type of exercise or some some type of functional task that they normally would be able to do. Then I also like to look at the barrier specific self efficacy scale, which actually tries to understand your own self efficacy or your confidence, your being your ability to exercise, regardless of whatever barriers might come in your way. So for the people that are here, maintaining my health was the number one reason why people gave, and that is pretty consistent with what we find in research is that people do want to maintain their health most. And then the second one while I was tired, so improve my mood was also tied with people who didn't give an answer, which is fine.

So maybe they needed to think about it a little bit more. What's the psychological aspect of it, you know, and what does it do for us psychologically, and then we move into people who felt like maintaining their weight was important. Feeling complete was important, pushing themselves beyond what they possibly could believe that they could do and then also feeling proud of themselves. And then sharing a group identity was important for one person, but I think as we go further into the talk, a lot of you will actually realize that sharing the identity with other people who are also, exercisers are is important to you, too. Thank you so much for doing the poll. And trying to understand the minority status of people who are triathletes was really important to me, even though there is a very low number of black triathletes. In 2016 survey conducted by USA Triathlon indicated that less than 1% of the members of the organization are actually black or self identified as black. When I talk about a triathlon, I'm talking about a sport in which you have three sports. So you swim, you bike, and then you run. There are four different links that you can take two doing triathlon and the shortest length is a sprint, where you have a 750 meter swim, a 13.1 mile bike ride, and then a 5k or a 3.1 mile run. You also have an Olympic distance, which is double that and then we have a half Ironman and Ironman. Many of you probably have seen the Kona Ironman on TV. And so that's the distance of doing a 2.4 mile swim. 112 mile bike ride and a 26.2 mile run, which is basically doing a marathon after doing all of that. So why black women, triathletes? They're probably one of the most extreme extreme group of exercises that there are out there. Why would you consider looking at them. And again, part of it is because of where I'm coming from as a triathlete and wanting to be able to understand what is it that motivates other women to be a part of this. So in this study, I had 140 participants in the survey Hall work, however, we only had 121 that we could use 19 were excluded. Some because they weren't the age, they weren't the proper age, we actually had two men that that did the study, which I thought was kind of funny. And then we had some people who did duplicate submissions. So they tried to do the study, you do the survey more than once. And so that wasn't gonna work. So in looking at the results of the survey itself, you can see that help orientation, or being more fit was a big motivator. Matter of fact, it was the biggest motivator, which we said was kind of the same thing for the people here in the poll, you know, being fit and staying fit and being healthy, that's extremely important. And, you know, when I got this, I thought, well, that's really important. But personal goal achievement was actually even higher than that. And I'm going to talk about that a little bit more, because I had an opportunity to speak to 12 of the women and kind of delve a little bit, why they felt the way that they felt, you can see one of the lowest was competition and beat the new person that's on the right side, and on the in the fourth, fourth line down, beat a new person. So competition actually turns out to be really important. The other thing that I like to do when looking at results is do a factor analysis. So a factor analysis is the practice of condensing many variables into just a few of the variables so that your data is kind of easier to work with. And the reason why researchers like to do it is because there's a theoretical concept that there's probably deeper factors or deeper reasons that are actually driving the underlying concepts of your data. And that if you do this analysis, you can kind of uncover what those are. I kind of like to look at factor analysis the same way I'd look at qualitative data, right, you get to go into seeing what people said, and you come out with these themes. And that's kind of what you do with factor analysis. So in this study, the four factors that were most important that kind of came out and brought the themes were health orientation, weight control, personal goal, achievement, and competition. The proportion of variance explained by these factors, gave me kind of like a cumulative proportion of the variance that was also explained, it shows that these four factors actually explained 64% of the variance. And this is what was really important to everybody that took the survey out of the 121 people that we looked at, when to talk to the women, and there was 12 of them from rural country ranging from being in North Carolina all the way to California. We have people from Boston, I had somebody who was from Colorado, it was really great. You know, what I did is I did this thing called survey transformation where I took the questions from the survey. And I basically made them into qualitative, semi semi structured questions so that we had an opportunity to talk to one another, but it wasn't so structured, where I could only ask those questions. Weight reduction mattered a lot to the women. But losing weight wasn't important the way Lee would think of it, right? One of the participants said, let's just say it straight. I'm a much better athlete and 190 pounds than I was at 285. I didn't lose weight because I wanted to be skinny. I lost weight because I wanted to get faster on the bike. And it worked. I think that a lot of black women miss out on what we can accomplish athletically because we are so sensitive to being criticized for our fitness level, based on our body type. The thing that is really wonderful about triathlon and the triathlon community is that you have people of all sizes, you have people of all races you have all people of different socio economic backgrounds that are part of it. And that is what makes triathlons so wonderful. A second theme that was externally regulated was physical attractiveness. Now, 11 of the women either described what it meant to be physically attractive, or how they believe others viewed them, explaining that being physically attractive to one may not be what's physically attracted to another one. And one woman said being physically attractive changes over time. For me physical attractive has changed over the years, when I was in my teens and 20s, physically attractive was being as thin as possible. I hated being muscular. This person was a dancer, I hated my belly dancer, I hated my thighs, because they were so muscular. I hated my behind, I was just like, I'm too heavy. And to this and to that, now, I love seeing myself, I love looking in the mirror, and flexing my arm and seeing cut. I love it. I love looking down at my calves. Because for me, that's power. So that's attractive to me. Personal competition, as I previously said, was not viewed as motivation because of other people. But it was the personal competition that a person had within themselves. Sure, women would see each other and they would say, you know, if I can catch her and pass her, then that means I'm going to improve my time. So it's not about actually beating the other person. It's about being able to beat the time that you had for yourself. A new theme of triathlon lifestyle emerged from the interviews, it is described as motivation that is perceived to be sustainable over time, as opposed to motivation that is temporary. The lifestyle itself is a journey one takes when they begin the sport, it continues through the participation of the sport, and looks forward toward the aspirations for the sport later in life. The one theme that identified within triathlon was the lifespan of the sport and that made it so worth the while. Talk to you about the veterans and pero fit. Jarrell fit is a program that was established in 1986. By the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina. It is a program that is for veterans who are 65 and older. And currently there are 17. I think there's probably more by now, nationally recognized Jarrell fit locations that span all the way from Virginia all the way to Honolulu, Hawaii program program enrollment occurs and on a rolling basis, so people can come in at any time of the year. And basically what happens is, a person will go to their doctor, and they'll go to their physician who will either recommend them for the program, or maybe they've heard about the program and they'll ask about it. One of the things that people have to be able to do the veterans have to do is they have to be able to function independently, right. And the goal is to help the person either increase their function, or at least maintain the function that they're at.

Occasionally, when you know sensitively staff at the term VA was low, they would allow other people to come in and be a part of the program. The thing that I really liked about this program in particular is that it was at a gym at a local gym. And so you would often see a lot of the people who weren't a part of Jarrow fit talking to the veterans who were part who are in zero fit. Or when they would be in a certain settings, they would work out with one another, or when we had dance class, they would come in and join the dance class. And it was just really neat to see how people would just come together and enjoy themselves. At the program, start participants are given a physical function assessment, which includes an eight foot get up and go a six minute walk. In addition, we take their body weight, we take their height, their waist circumference, and the veterans have to respond to a certain number of questionnaires that assess their overall health, the quality of life or physical activity. And this occurs on an annual basis. When I was a part of Gera fit, this was part of my, my postdoc. And I had the best time there with these guys. They were just so much fun. But my whole point of being there was to be able to do research. And so again, I was like, okay, so what is it that motivates these guys to be here? Why are they still coming here, and there were people that had been there for over 20 years. So I got to work with people who were in their 80s. And they had been there since they were 65. We have people you know, and it became a big thing to be the oldest person and Gerald fit. That was a huge deal. And they were you know, almost competition, so to speak to say, I'm the oldest person that person is only a month younger than me, but I'm still older than them. And I'm still here and I'm still exercising for this study. So use the quantitative and qualitative methods. For this one, though, I use the motive motors for physical activity measure. It's a little bit shorter than the moms and and so that's part of the reason why I did it. Afterwards, I conducted four interviews with three veterans in one spouse who had been part of the program for over 10 years. We found out that both the men and some of the women who came wanted to be there to maintain their health and well being right. And they often said that it wasn't really the social aspect that brought them there. But she would never know that considering how much they talked to one another, and sometimes got, you know, got behind on what they were supposed to do, because they were talking to each other so much. One of the oldest participants there, her name was Miss Mary and Miss Mary had been there for years. She had been there even after her husband passed away. And when Miss Mary showed up, she was using, she was in a wheelchair, I remember she was in a wheelchair, Miss Mary was special. And everybody in the gym kind of newer, everybody knew Ms. Mary. And when we met, I asked her, I said, you know, Miss Mary, what are your goals? What do you want to do? And she said, goals, I'm 94 years old, what do I need to go for? I kind of laughed at her. Because I was like, What are you doing here then? Right. And she thought about it. And she eventually came in, she said, You know, I have a church function that I have to be at next summer. And I want to be able to walk to that church function, I don't want to be in his wheelchair. And so we worked with each other for about six or seven months. And Mary was able to get out of that wheelchair. And she was able to use the walker and she was able to go to her church function using her walker. And that meant so much to not just me, but everybody who was at the gym, especially the veterans, they just thought it was the coolest thing in the world. But it really went to show us that, you know, it doesn't matter what age you are, if you're willing to take the steps that you need to take, and you've got, you know, the intrinsic motivation, it's very possible to be able to exercise and it's very possible to make changes in your life. The most recent thing that I've been able to do is look at COVID-19. So everybody has been affected by the pandemic. And last summer, when I was stuck in my house, unable to go anywhere. I thought about all the people who possibly were not able to exercise and were not able to get to the gym. And so I thought, You know what, here's good time to kind of see what's going on with people. And so any smart researcher knows that you get people who are smarter than you to work with you to do something. And so I called some friends of Dr. Catherine Ramos who said, do and then Dr. Frank Diaz Garelli. And I talked to Dr. Colby Ford, who were both at UNCC. And I said, Hey, I want to do some research, and just kind of try to see if we can figure out what's going on with people right now in the wake of the pandemic, and how are they exercising? And how are they able to stay motivated? And so we use the snowball method. So basically, all I did was put everything out on Facebook, and probably some of the people who were listening to this are like, oh, yeah, I did that. And so we use social media, we use Snapchat, use Instagram, we put Facebook out, we just said, Hey, we're just, you know, we just want to really understand what it is that people are going through right now, would you be willing to do the surveys. And so we use the surveys that you see here. And basically, because we kind of wanted to understand both whether or not there was a correlation between exercise and the motivation to exercise and with whether or not person is satisfied with life, whether or not they have that confidence in being able to still exercise regardless of the fact that we are in a pandemic, and being able to understand whether or not people have depressive symptoms. And if that is having an effect on their exercise ability. Now, we have figured out everything, so I just kind of wanted to give you all a taste of what we're doing. Right. So we had 329 participants, and we found out most were still working full time, a lot of people were able to still work full time. And they still were exercising five to six times per week. And most of them were exercising between 41 to 60 minutes, both each time that they were doing it right. And we also wanted to see you know, is this increase or decrease to the number of people who have exercise and we're finding out that kind of the same right? But people have mode might have modified the way that they're exercising. So those people who were used to going into a gym, they have now bought the equipment so I'm sure everybody knows that, you know, peloton has just taken off, right? Because people are finding ways to be able to exercise. Cool thing about this is that we were able to find people that were you know, across the United States, and I pulled up the one that's about working out being a healthy reason because that is a big reason why people choose to exercise and at the same time, wanted to kind of see how it worked for people who were both 45 and older. So those are people that are in the blue, and the people who are 45 and younger what it looks like for them also, I've highlighted the people who are 45 and older however, because I like to look at the midlife to older folks to see what's going on. And so the question was asked, you know, basically, are you working out to stay healthy? Is this important to you? You know, one being not that important, seven being the most important, and both for both groups for people who are 45 and older, and for those who are 45 and younger. Yeah, this is a very important thing. I'm really excited because we're going to, you know, continue doing some more analysis with this. And hopefully, after we all get over this pandemic, have an opportunity to go back to some of the people who were willing to and ask them these questions again over the next year. And I just wanted to give a special thank you to the University of Maryland Baltimore County, Harrison School of aging studies, the doctoral program in gerontology UMBC athletics, new NBCU invece chapter of Sigma Phi Omega. Thank you to everyone who made this possible. I think the women have fast chicks and the Jarrell fit during BMAC and everybody that's here.

Campus Connections, campus connections, campus connections, campus connections, campus connections.

Now it's time for Campus Connections, the part of the podcast where we connect today's featured content to other work happening at UMBC. Today, our production assistant, Alex Andrews, is back with more great UMBC research to tell us all about. Alex, what is the connection this week?

Thanks, Dr. Anson. This installment of Campus Connections, we'll be taking a look at a project that involves several schools from around the world. The University of Seville, the University of Caronia and of course, UMBC's Department of Information Systems. Foad Hamidi, an assistant professor from our Department of Information Systems, contributed to this research project "Physiological Computing, as a Facilitator for the Promotion of Physical Activity in People with Functional Diversity." The goal of this project was to use physiological computing to create optimal physical activity conditions for people with disabilities. They mean to provide alternative exercising techniques with the use of computers, while also being able to monitor the condition of the user to promote safe and effective physical activity. Through the use of wearable devices, they found that they could successfully adapt the exercises that were presented on screen to the needs of the individual, rather than generalizing for all people with disabilities. That's all for this week's Campus Connection. Back to you, Dr. Anson.

Thank you, as always, Alex, for that fantastic summary. You know, listeners, you might not realize this, but Alex creates, writes, researches, and produces all of that content himself, and it's really a fantastic piece of work. You know, we have a whole lot more Receiving the Social Sciences coming to you over the holidays. So stay tuned while you spend your time off, relaxing, enjoying time with friends and family, and hopefully even trying out some new forms of exercise and recreation. And you know, maybe, just maybe I'll be back on the air in January ready to tell you all about my underdog victory in the national pickleball championship. Until then, keep questioning.

Retrieving the Social Sciences is a production of the UMBC Center for Social Science Scholarship. Our director is Dr. Christine Mallinson, our Associate Director is Dr. Felipe Filomeno, and our production intern is Alex Andrews. Our theme music was composed and recorded by D'Juan Moreland. Find out more about CS3 at socialscience@umbc.edu and make sure to follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, where you can find full video recordings of recent CS3 events. Until next time, keep questioning.