The Perception of Leisure By Grandparents in the Era of Active Ageing: Conflicting or Complementary Roles?

Family, education and work in later life, care for grandchildren as well as the imperative of “active” and “healthy” ageing are framing and structuring the everyday life and decisions of the Czech ageing population. The paper aims to bring new insights into the problem of the role overload, i.e. “the stress generated within a person when he either cannot comply or has difficulty complying with the expectations of a role or a set of roles” (Burr 1973 in Lee 1988: 776). Based on triangulation of quantitative (representative survey) and qualitative (open-ended in-depth interviews) data generated within the research project “Role overload: grandparents in the era of active ageing”, the perception of various and dynamic roles performed by the elderly will be examined, focusing, for the purpose of this paper, mainly on the perception of leisure time and leisure activities in the context of the interpretation and experience of other role expectations and role performances. We perceive leisure as a specific integrating field in which the particular roles may be perceived both as complementary as well as conflicting, depending on the self-positioning, available recourses and the interpretation of the grandparent´s role itself by the grandparents as well as by other relatives and members of relevant social networks. The attention, then, will be paid to the ways how the possible challenging intersection of these different levels are coped with and actively shaped and lived.