Individual Wellbeing and Bridge: An Empirical Analysis

Abstract

There is a growing interest in the Sociology of bridge. This research is part of a wider examination of bridge from a sociological and medical perspective, and is conducted with the intention of providing some of the groundwork for a larger study of the social and cognitive benefits of playing bridge, in particular its role in delaying the onset and reducing the severity of dementia (Ashworth et al., 2016; Graham & Punch, 2016). At the top level, bridge can be a professional card game played full-time by experts who are sponsored to play in teams. It is a mind sport that, even at amateur level, requires much work in terms of developing bridge partnerships and strategies. The dynamics of bridge can be understood in relation to a range of sociological areas such as gender, class, age and generation, identity. In this paper we address another key sociological topic: individual wellbeing. This exploratory study contributes to the evidence base on the benefits of playing bridge by answering the following research questions: 1. What are the characteristics of bridge players and their playing habits? 2. Is there an association between playing bridge and measures of individual wellbeing? Related dataset available at: http://hdl.handle.net/11667/84