“The Vehicle Was a Hockey Game”: A Holistic Approach to Aging for Older Men
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The many benefits of physical activity are well established. Nonetheless, there remains a need for qualitative research on aging and sports focused on the normalization of sport for older adults, and the increased opportunity for sport participation in older age. Aging and sport research, which has primarily focussed on older elite athletes, has found older adults value health-related benefits, social interaction, and resistance of the aging process through sport participation. However, research examining a broader scope of specific sport participation, such as hockey, in older age may provide a distinguished understanding of participation tied to meaning and lifestyle factors. Therefore, the primary objectives of this study were to understand 1) how participating in hockey in later life influences the aging experience, and 2) meaning and motivation for hockey participation in older age. Semi-structured interviews were administrated to 10 Canadian men aged 50 years or older who continued to participate in hockey. Through thematic analysis of the interviews, eight themes were identified: 1) physical ability and injuries, 2) social interaction and camaraderie, 3) relationship of hockey and PAL, 4) competition and leisure, 5) youthfulness, 6) identity and pride, 7) accessibility and opportunity, and 8) mental/cognitive health. Through the interpretation of the results, an Active Aging Wheel of Engagement approach was presented. Overall, hockey was more than a mere physical activity, it was a multi-faceted contributor to many aspects of these older men’s lives as it fulfilled several of their self-perceived motivations and desires. The participants conceptualized hockey as an all-encompassing approach to successful aging, perceiving the sport as a healthy and integral physically active leisure in their lives, rather than a risky and dangerous endeavor in later life.
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 | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| 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".