Does Cognitive Age Play a Role at the Intersection of Age and Leisure? An Exploratory Analysis

Abstract

The authors explore the possibility of cognitive age coming into play in an activity falling at the intersection of age and leisure. Specifically, they study coffee shop customers in Kuwait to determine if people act based on their chronological age or their cognitive age. The authors analyze respondents in matched-groups, where groups with the same cognitive and chronological age are compared to groups where cognitive age differed from chronological age. Findings show that chronological age and cognitive age are highly correlated, but slightly different. Correlations reveal that one or both age indicators are related to most of the coffee variables in the study. However, only three out of fifty-one tests of differences revealed a significant test statistic necessary to support cognitive age. In other words, a vast majority of the tests support chronological age as more relevant than cognitive age, at least in the context of coffee shop customers in Kuwait.