Differences in social participation of older adults across European welfare regimes: Fourteen years of SHARE data collection

Abstract

Social participation amongst older adults is considered generally beneficial and is supported by active ageing policies in Europe. However, efforts to increase the quality of life and enhance the ageing experience may have the unintended consequence of increasing later life inequalities. This study uses six waves from SHARE to illustrate how social participation develops over time and how it is structured by education, financial situation and health status in the context of five European welfare regimes. The level of participation slightly increases over time for the population 55+, whilst the inequalities in access to these activities and their outcomes remain stable. Therefore, support of these activities does not strengthen or reduce inequalities amongst older adults – it may rather legitimise the inequalities in its emphasis on individual responsibilities. These findings suggest that the active ageing approach needs to become more context-sensitive or replaced by other social policy approaches.

Active ageing profiles among older adults in Spain: A Multivariate analysis based on SHARE study

“…This paper has expanded the health-related indicators by adding others linked to the use of medical services [85], nutrition [86] and alcohol consumption [87]; all of them have been related to functionality, morbidity and/or mortality [85][86][87]. As regards the Participation pillar, SHARE provides information on the type of activities carried out and their frequency, usually considered by most authors [88][89][90][91][92]. For the Lifelong Learning pillar, consideration was given to basic skills (reading, writing or computer use) and involvement in training activities [93], while in the Security pillar, measures related mainly to financial security were considered, due to the limitation of the source.…”