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Enriching Lives: How Spending Time with Pets is Related to the Experiential Well-Being of Older Americans

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Abstract

This study examines how caring for pets and walking, exercising, or playing with pets is associated with the experiential well-being of older Americans using activity-episode-level data from the 2010, 2012, and 2013 American Time Use Surveys (ATUS) and their associated Well-Being Modules (WBM). Estimating a series of ordered probit models that relate various measures of experiential well-being to different measures of pet-related activities, the results show that caring for pets is associated with greater meaning than other activities, controlling for a standard set of demographic and other person-level characteristics. Walking, exercising, or playing with household pets or animals is associated with greater happiness and meaning and less stress relative to other activities. The results from sensitivity analyses show that the magnitudes of the associations for people who live alone are larger than for those who live with others.

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Data Availability

This paper uses the publicly available American Time Use Survey data set. It can be found here: https://www.bls.gov/tus/data.htm

Notes

  1. These three years are all similar in terms of the business cycle. They are all expansion years so there should be no business-cycle effects on time-use. However, year controls still are included in the models to control for any changes in macroeconomic conditions across the years and any other year-specific, unobserved factors affecting people’s time use.

  2. The ATUS 2013 lexicon code for this activity is 020601.

  3. The ATUS 2013 lexicon code for this activity is 020602.

  4. Hispanics may be of any race. Because of their large representation in the population and the sample, Hispanic ethnicity is included as a demographic control in our models while other ethnicities are not.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank Nana Twum Owusu-Peprah for excellent research assistance and Karen S. Hamrick and Sabrina Wulff Pabilonia for their valuable comments and suggestions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Personal Financial Planning, Texas Tech University, 1301 Akron Avenue, Box 41210, Lubbock, TX, 79409-1210, USA

    Charlene M. Kalenkoski

  2. Personal and Family Financial Planning, Norton School of Family and Consumer Sciences, The University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA

    Thomas Korankye

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  1. Charlene M. Kalenkoski
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Correspondence to Charlene M. Kalenkoski.

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Kalenkoski, C.M., Korankye, T. Enriching Lives: How Spending Time with Pets is Related to the Experiential Well-Being of Older Americans. Applied Research Quality Life 17, 489–510 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11482-020-09908-0

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