Nap Time – Popular with Many Americans but Daily
Ritual for Most Senior Citizens over 80
Pew Research Center finds napping popular at bottom
and top of income scale
July
29, 2009 - Feeling drowsy? You're not alone. On a typical day, a third
of the adults (34%) in the United States take a nap. But, this is
clearly a favorite activity for the oldest of senior citizens, according
to a Pew Research Center Social & Demographic Trends survey.
Napping spikes among the old -- but only among the
very old. More than half of adults ages 80 and older say they napped in
the past day.
Among every other age group in the survey -
including both the young (ages 18 to 29) and the old (ages 70 to 79) -
about a third say they napped in the past 24 hours.
More
men than women report that they caught a little snooze in the past 24
hours -- 38% vs. 31%. This gender gap occurs almost entirely among older
adults. More than four-in-ten ( 41%) men ages 50 and older say they
napped in the past day, compared with just 28% of women of the same age.
Below the age of 50, men and women are about
equally likely to say they napped in the past day (35% vs. 34%).
There are distinctive racial patterns to napping.
Half of the black adults in our survey say they napped in the past 24
hours, compared with just a third of whites and Hispanics.
Napping is quite common at the lower end of the
income scale; some 42% of adults with an annual income below $30,000
report they napped in the past day. As income rises, napping declines.
However, at the upper end of the scale (adults
whose annual income is $100,000 or above) the tendency to nap revives
and reverts to the mean.
These findings are based on responses to a question
in a wide-ranging survey about aging that asked people if they had
engaged in each of 10 different activities in the past 24 hours -- among
them driving a car, getting some exercise, going shopping, watching
television, using the internet, praying and taking a nap.1
Trouble Sleeping?
The survey also asked respondents if they had
trouble sleeping in the past 24 hours -- and, not surprisingly, it finds
a correlation between nap-taking and trouble sleeping.
Notes: The original report written by Paul Taylor,
Pew Research Center.
● Read the
full report at pewsocialtrends.org.
●
Read the original news release
