Edge Hill University
Exploring the ‘active ageing’ agenda and the role of individual responsibility in ‘ageing well’ through a community sport-for-health education programme, Active Blues.
The World Health Organisation claimed that sport is ‘an underutilized yet important contributor to physical activity for people of all ages, in addition to providing significant social, cultural and economic benefits to communities and nations’ (WHO, 2018: 17), yet many adults globally are insufficiently active to accrue these benefits.
Using evidence from Active Blues (AB), a programme funded as part of Sport England’s Get Healthy, Get Active initiative, this paper provides new insight on how men’s experiences of a community sport-for-health education programme in England are largely framed in relation to their age and the ageing process. AB participants viewed sport as a platform in which they could age successfully, often referring to overcoming age related health conditions, either in terms of managing or avoiding them in the future.
Although sport participation enabled many of the AB participants in this study to remain physically and socially active as they aged, we must be conscious of the range of experiences of later life for men. A second group of participants who learned about AB but chose not to attend, experienced the ageing process in line with a ‘deficit’ model of ageing, whereby growing old led to unavoidable decline where they were likely to encounter disease and other age-related problems which hindered their ability to participate.
The findings lead us to question public health messages and media reports which unquestionably allocate individual responsibility with older populations, such as older men, who should participate in ‘active ageing’ if they are to ‘age well’.
Dr Tom Duffell’s Edge Hill University staff page.