By employing the life course perspective, this study has demonstrated how bingo plays an integral part of senior citizens living in two rural towns in Pennsylvania. Bingo encourages socialization and friendship development while strengthening local communities.
Many interviewees stressed the significance of bingo to their lives; it provides regular opportunities for social engagement while simultaneously disengaging from external forces.
Socialization
Bingo provides senior citizens with more than just numbers – it provides them with a sense of community and purpose, allows them to connect with friends and neighbors, bridges the divide between rural life and urban communities, as well as providing psychological and social benefits that provide positive psychological and social benefits for senior citizens.
Many participants in this study relied heavily on bingo as the sole social event they regularly attended, since other community organizations or activities required too much mobility for them. Furthermore, bingo sellers provided by SGC sellers rarely applied sales pressure during games, and often struck up conversations with regular players during them.
Online bingo communities can foster greater social interactions by using in-game communication tools that encourage members to interact and form friendships, in addition to hosting community challenges and tournaments that foster competition and teamwork.
Mental stimulation
Bingo may seem like an innocuous pastime for elderly people to kill time while also helping improve memory, concentration and pattern recognition skills. Furthermore, bingo teaches players to manage expectations, cope with wins and losses as well as build emotional resilience that can benefit other areas of their life.
Study results by Southampton University showed that bingo players, on average, demonstrated improved memory and concentration than those in a control group. It’s believed this may be because bingo requires long periods of focussing on one specific thing and thus increases our concentration skills.
Alzheimer’s and dementia sufferers can benefit from adapting this game for use, using cards with larger print and greater contrast and asking players to identify colors or other familiar objects instead of numbers.
Physical activity
Researchers conducted a recent study using Bingo as an intervention platform to increase physical activity among older adults. Their program, Bingocize, combined this game with exercise and nutrition education. Exercise components included walking, light stretching and resistance training as well as providing participants with an accelerometer that tracked both their daily sedentary time and physical activity levels – two-thirds of women reported meeting recommended physical activity guidelines according to self-report data collected during this experiment.
This study demonstrated how Bingo can be an effective tool for increasing socialization and decreasing sedentary behavior among older adults. Furthermore, combining Bingo with an exercise program increased participation, improved lower and upper-body strength as well as mental cognition, as well as being fun and enjoyable way for participants to meet new friends while helping reduce stigma associated with exercise – often seen by older adults as something which causes muscle pain or soreness.
Chances of winning
Even though many believe bingo to be an entirely random and luck-based activity, there is actually much strategy involved in its play. You can increase your odds of success by choosing the appropriate card; alternatively there are ways of increasing them such as short games with no complex patterns to worry about.
Sit near the caller if possible to help ensure you can hear them better and find your cards more quickly. In addition, invest in an effective dauber to mark squares efficiently.
Bingo players interviewed have reported that bingo offers them socialization and community. Janet, who lives alone and enjoys bingo as an activity that “gets me out of the house and gives me something to do”, expressed this sentiment during an interview held 8 April 2013 in Bonneauville. Bingo can have an enormously beneficial effect on seniors by helping combat feelings of loneliness and isolation.