Active Ageing: A Comparative Approach

Malina Voicu , Romania Academy, Research Institute for Quality of Life
Madalina-Elena Manea, Research Institute for the Quality of Life, Romanian Academy

European population is ageing, with the share of people aged 65+ expected to undergo a momentous increase. Consequently, the relationship between the elderly and other segments of society is going through significant scrutiny. Within the debate, there is relative consensus on the importance of active ageing for the elderly and the society as a whole, but there is still no established way of measuring the concept in a way that is both culturally sensitive and allows for a sufficiently broad notion of ‘being active’. In this paper, we propose a model of active ageing which provides an integrated view on the repertoire of actions involved in active ageing, allows for inter-individual and cross-cultural variations, and takes into account individual motivation. Theoretically, we conceptualize active ageing as a set of strategies employed by mature/old adults to meet their objectives in daily life, based on their own needs, motivations, and resources. Moreover, we validate the measure cross-nationally using external validation, showing that it relates as expected with variables measuring individual capacities and contextual opportunities. Using EQLS 2016 data and Latent Class Analysis, we show that active ageing is captured by a latent variable with three classes and we validate the measure by using the latent variable as outcome in a multilevel multinomial logistic regression. Furthermore, we test the cross-country measurement invariance of the structural model.

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 Presented in Session P2. Poster Session Ageing, Health and Mortality