Activities of contemporary Mayan elders

摘要

Social gerontology researchers have investigated various aspects ofelder activities in diverse culture contexts. This project assessed theknowledge that Mayan people have about the activities of their elders.Data were collected through two interview procedures. The firstprocedure, free-listing, was conducted with an initial sample of Mayansubjects (n = 31), who provided terms representing their culturalknowledge of elder Mayan activities. A second sample (n = 56)performed a pile sort task using 18 of those activities. The pile sortfindings were subjected to multidimensional scaling, and that techniqueproduced a two-dimensional visual representation of three distinctclusters of activities: productive work, serious socio-religiousundertakings and frivolous ventures. Besides the coherentmultidimensional scaling representation for that total sample of 56subjects, scalings for subsamples based on generational affiliation wererun. Two-dimensional pictures or visual maps for the aged, middle-agedand young adult subjects are remarkably similar to each other and to thepicture for the total sample. From a methodological perspective theresearch findings demonstrate that elder Mayan activities, andpresumably those of elders in other societies, are amenable to interviewprocedures that have high validity and high reliability.