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Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
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Class, cohort and consumption
— the British experience of the third age | | Author(s) | Chris Gilleard, Paul Higgs, Martin Hyde |
| Journal title | Journals of Gerontology: Series B, Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences, vol 60B, no 6, November 2005 |
| Pages | pp S305-S310 |
| Source | http://www.geron.org |
| Keywords | Consumer ; Social class ; Cross sectional surveys ; Longitudinal surveys. |
| Annotation | The relative effect of historical and social class location on engagement in consumerism is examined within two different cohorts of retired people in the UK. The first is a stratified sample of 284 men and women in their 60s and 70s drawn from the Boyd-Orr 1930s survey of childhood diet and health. The representativeness of findings from that study was checked using data from the 2002 English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA). The consumer index used in the Boyd-Orr survey demonstrated sufficient internal reliability to provide an operational measurement of "consumerism" within the retired population. Analyses of variance confirmed that class at exit and cohort but not class of origin contributed significantly to variation in levels of consumerism. These effects were not mediated by cohort differences in health. Occupational standing immediately before retirement was associated with "consumerism" after retirement. The results also show that birth cohorts exercised a stronger historical influence on content consumption in later life than did class background (i.e. parental social class). This supports the authors' thesis that the limited but increasing immersion in mass consumer society of successive cohorts who were born and grew up earlier in the 20th century continues to be reflected in levels of "consumerism" in retirement. (RH). |
| Accession Number | CPA-060314229 A |
| Classmark | WY: T: 3KB: 3J |
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing |
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| ...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing. |
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