Activities of contemporary Mayan elders

Social gerontology researchers have investigated various aspects of elder activities in diverse culture contexts. This project assessed the knowledge that Mayan people have about the activities of their elders. Data were collected through two interview procedures. The first procedure, free-listing, was conducted with an initial sample of Mayan subjects (n=31), who provided terms representing their cultural knowledge of elder Mayan activities. A second sample (n=56) performed a pile sort task using 18 of those activities. The pile sort findings were subjected to multidimensional scaling, and that technique produced a two-dimensional visual representation of three distinct clusters of activities: productive work, serious socio-religious undertakings and frivolous ventures. Besides the coherent multidimensional scaling representation for that total sample of 56 subjects, scalings for subsamples based on generational affiliation were run. Two-dimensional pictures or visual maps for the aged, middle-aged and young adult subjects are remarkably similar to each other and to the picture for the total sample. From a methodological perspective the research findings demonstrate that elder Mayan activities, and presumably those of elders in other societies, are amenable to interview procedures that have high validity and high reliability.