Time use, daily activities, and health-related quality of life of school-going late adolescents in Cork city and county: A cross-sectional study

Aim: This thesis examines a question posed by founding occupational scientist Dr. Elizabeth Yerxa (1993) – “what is the relationship between human engagement in a daily round of activity (such as work, play, rest and sleep) and the quality of life people experience including their healthfulness” (p. 3). Specifically, I consider Yerxa’s question in relation to the quotidian activities and health-related quality of life (HRQoL) of late adolescents (aged 15 - 19 years) in Ireland. This research enquiry was informed by an occupational perspective of health and by population health, ecological, and positive youth development perspectives. Methods: This thesis is comprised of five studies. Two scoping literature reviews informed the direction of three empirical studies. In the latter, cross-sectional time use and HRQoL data were collected from a representative sample of 731 school-going late adolescents (response rate 52%) across 28 schools across Cork city and county (response rate 76%). In addition to socio-demographic data, time use data were collected using a standard time diary instrument while a nationally and internationally validated instrument, the KIDSCREEN-52, was used to measure HRQoL. Variable-centred and person-centred analyses were used. Results: The scoping reviews identified the lack of research on well populations or an adolescent age range within occupational therapy and occupational science; limited research testing the popular assumption that time use is related to overall well-being and quality of life; and the absence of studies that examined adolescent 24-hour time use and quality of life. Established international trends were mirrored in the findings of the examination of weekday and weekend time use. Aggregate-level, variable-centred analyses yielded some significant associations between HRQoL and individual activities, independent of school year, school location, family context, social class, nationality or diary day. The person-centred analysis of overall time use identified three male profiles (productive, high leisure and all-rounder) and two female profiles (higher study/lower leisure and moderate study/higher leisure). There was tentative support for the association between higher HRQoL and more balanced time use profiles. Conclusion: The findings of this thesis highlight the gendered nature of adolescent time use and HRQoL. Participation in daily activities, singly and in combination, appears to be associated with HRQoL. However, the nature of this relationship is complex. Individually and collectively, adolescents need to be educated and supported to create health through their everyday patterns of doing.

States of play: Irish childhoods, race and belonging

This thesis explores the meaning-making practices of migrant and non-migrant children in relation to identities, race, belonging and childhood itself in their everyday lives and in the context of ‘normalizing’ discourses and spaces in Ireland. The relational, spatial and institutional contexts of children’s worlds are examined in the arenas of school, home, family, peer groups and consumer culture. The research develops a situated account of children’s complex subject positions, belongings and exclusions, as negotiated within discursive constructs, emerging in the ‘in-between’ spaces explored with other children and with adults. As a peripheral EU area both geographically and economically, Ireland has traditionally been a country of net emigration. This situation changed briefly in the late 1990s to early 2000s, sparking broad debate on Ireland’s perceived ‘new’ ethnic, cultural and linguistic diversity arising from the arrival of migrant people both from within and beyond the EU as workers and as asylum seekers, and drawing attention to issues of race, identity, equality and integration in Irish society. Based in a West of Ireland town where migrant children and children of migrants comprise very small minorities in classroom settings, this research engages with a particular demographic of children who have started primary school since these changes have occurred. It seeks to represent the complexities of the processes which constitute children’s subjectivities, and which also produce and reproduce race and childhood itself in this context. The role of local, national and global spaces, relational networks and discursive currents as they are experienced and negotiated by children are explored, and the significance of embodied, sensory and affective processes are integrated into the analysis. Notions of the functions and rhetorics of play and playfulness (Sutton-Smith 1997) form a central thread that runs throughout the thesis, where play is both a feature of children’s cultural worlds and a site of resistance or ‘thinking otherwise’. The study seeks to examine how children actively participate in (re)producing definitions of both childhood and race arising in local, national and global spaces, demonstrating that while contestations of the boundaries of childhood discourses are contingently successful, race tends to be strongly reiterated, clinging to bodies and places and compromising belonging. In addition, it explores how children access belongings through agentic and imaginative practices with regard to peer and family relationships, particularly highlighting constructions of home, while also illustrating practices of excluding children positioned as unintelligible, including the role of silences in such situations. Finally, drawing on teachers’ understandings and on children’s playful micro-level negotiations of race, the study argues that assumptions of childhood innocence contribute to justifying depoliticised discourses of race in the early primary school years, and also tend to silence children’s own dialogues with this issue. Central throughout the thesis is an emphasis on the productive potentials of children’s marginal positioning in processes of transgressing definitional boundaries, including the generation of post-race conceptualisations that revealed the borders of race as performative and fluid. It suggests that interrupting exclusionary raced identities in Irish primary schools requires engagement with children’s world-making practices and the multiple resources that inform their lives.