Exploring elderly people's daily time-use patterns in the living environment of Beijing, China

To develop an age-friendly society, it is a basic task to deeply understand what and how factors would affect elderly people's daily multiple-activity time-use patterns. In the literature, the impacts of built environments as the physical aspects of living environments have been widely studied. However, the impacts of social environments as the social aspects of living environments on multiple activity participation and duration constrained by time budgets have not been found. To fill this gap, this paper makes efforts to propose various social environmental indicators and incorporate them into a multiple discrete-continuous extreme value (MDCEV) model to test the significance of each variable and to explore the impacts of living environments on elderly people's daily multiple-activity time-use behaviours. In addition to socio-economic compositions, the social environmental indicators are extended to social ties of people, living pressure, social resources distribution, social safety and policy. Then a joint elasticity analysis for multiple activity participation and duration with constraints is proposed for deriving policy and practice implications. The specifications and joint elasticity analysis in Beijing of China which is a representative city affected by Confucian culture and faced with aging problem in Eastern and South-eastern Asia help find out significant factors and their impacts on elderly people's multiple-activity time-use patterns. Policy and practice implications are suggested to improve elderly people's out-of-home activity participation and duration so that an age-friendly society is expected. • Propose social environments indicators. • Integrate living environments into a MDCEV model. • Integrate living environments into a MDCEV model.