Recreation activities of the elderly in the pandemic period

Among the solutions to the problems experienced in modern societies, there are activities that increase the quality of daily life of the individual. Recreation is the period of time that the individual uses to renew, improve and enrich his/her life, except for work and obligations, of his own free will. Leisure time occupies an important place in a modern society. Because, it is a multifaceted concept that affects life and is woven into the living culture. The Covid-19 originating from the People's Republic of China, which caused a great change throughout the world, was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization and this has severely affected the living standards of individuals in recreation. Turkey, especially over the age of sixty-five citizens of the curfew during the pandemic has become quite limited recreation activities for elderly people. The study group of the study consists of participants aged 65 and over who live in the Sapanca district of Sakarya Province. The data of the study were collected between November 2020 and February 2021, and data were collected from 60 participants.,. Due to the curfew imposed during the pandemic period, the number of participants was limited to 60 people. All these participants participated in both the quantitative and qualitative aspects of the study. Qualitative research is modeled with the multiple holistic case study design method. The study group was selected using the snowball sampling method, which is a non-random sampling method. The study aims to examine how elderly people manage their leisure activities to cope with the problems during the pandemic. A quantitative scale was used and this scale was supported by qualitative questions. PASE items are presented with frequency and percentage tables, and the median, standard deviation, and arithmetic mean of the scores are calculated for their sub-dimensions. For comparison, Mann-Whitney U tests by gender and Kruskal-Wallis tests by age group were used. It was found that the prohibitions applied to the elderly during the pandemic led to significant changes in their physical activities, and this led to both physical and psychological problems. From the opinions on how recreational activities changed before and during the pandemic, it was concluded that there was a negative change. These changes in physical activity were also studied by gender and age and it was found that there is no significant difference by gender. When examined by age, it was found that physical activity decreased with increasing age range. Studying the difficulties faced by the elderly during the pandemic, it was concluded that they had difficulties related to the use of technology. While the aim is to create a lifelong learning society, it is a fact that the elderly constitute a part of this society. The question of how elderly people use their leisure time during the pandemic can contribute to the development of lifelong education and highlight important points about the difficulties that older people face during pandemics and point out the issues in which they need to support and improvement. It is important that lifelong education aims at a society where the world is changing and people of all ages have access to information that can keep pace with this change.