The AAQ provides researchers, clinicians and policy makers with a unique scale to measure the impact of successful ageing interventions. It also provides a vehicle for the measurement of how individuals age across cultures and under different economic, political and social circumstances.

Present findings suggest that classifying a respondent as nondepressed is not sufficient and is still not informative about his or her QOL and attitudes toward aging status.

The study was the first of its kind to consider attitudes to ageing and expectations for FP across three cultural groups. Overall an interesting pattern of results emerged suggesting that both Chinese groups remain invested in the concept of FP, whereas the UK sample was not. In contrast, however, the Chinese immigrants and the UK participants were more similar in reporting attitudes to ageing than the Chinese participants who were more likely to endorse a loss-deficit view of ageing.

The WHOQOL-BREF and WHOQOL-OLD questionnaires demonstrate acceptable psychometric performance in a convenience sample of Spanish older people. They are valuable measures of QoL for use with older people.

No abstract