Older adult perceptions of play and play-enabling public space
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The everyday geographies of aging underscore the importance of public space in supporting older adult physical activity, social interaction, and general wellbeing. The age-friendly discourse outlines public space planning principles and guidelines to dismantle built environment barriers and minimize physical risk. However, public space planning can go beyond the instrumental pragmatism of prevention. The notion of age-friendly public space can expand to include non-obligatory, noncommodifiable opportunities for positive social and physical engagement. Public space can be a domain for older adult play. This study examines older adult perceptions of play in public space using the photovoice method with 14 older adults in Victoria, Canada. The findings demonstrate that older adults conceptualize play as more than simply a set of activities. Play was viewed as a state-of-being and an expression of freedom. To enable older adult play, public space must be accessible, flexible, and provide opportunities for creativity and spontaneity. Public spaces with natural, immersive, and interactive environments that provide positive sensory experiences were found to be particularly well suited to fostering older adult play. This study reimagines the potential of age-friendly planning and encourages policymakers to consider, integrate, and support play as an age-friendly intervention.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".