The effects of prolonged working life on subjective quality of life across Europe

2021

Ageing and Society

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The active ageing approach supports a set of roles or activities that are supposed to be beneficial for older adults. This paper reassesses the benefits of activities for the quality of life by (a) analysing many activities at the same time to control each other, (b) using panel data to detect the effects of activities over time, and (c) performing separate analyses for four European regions to test the context-specificity of the effects. The effects of roles in later life are tested on panel data from three waves of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) project. The results of fixed-effects regression show that only some activities – volunteering, participating in a club and physical activity – increase the quality of life, and that care-giving within the household has the opposite effect. Moreover, the beneficial effects are much weaker and less stable than the other types of regression suggest; they are beneficial only in some regions, and their effect is much weaker than the effects of age, health and economic situation. Therefore, the active ageing approach and activity theory should reflect the diverse conditions and needs of older adults to formulate more-context-sensitive and less-normative policy recommendations.

Section: Empirical Evidence On the Effects Of Activities And Their Interdependenciesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The effect of roles prescribed by active ageing on quality of life across European regions

2021

Ageing and Society

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“…Moreover, the chance of devoting oneself to particular activities in later life is shaped by individual and relational characteristics, such as class, gender, age, geographical location, education, and social capital (Galenkamp et al, 2016;Holstein & Minkler, 2003;Lakomý, 2019;Rozanova et al, 2012;Serrat, Villar, & Celdrán, 2015;Siegrist & Wahrendorf, 2009). This empirical research shows a higher prevalence of all activities except intensive caregiving amongst younger, healthier, wealthier, and more educated older adults.…”

Section: Prevalence Of Activities and Its Structuration By Regionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This empirical research shows a higher prevalence of all activities except intensive caregiving amongst younger, healthier, wealthier, and more educated older adults. Gender differences are more complex -women seem less active on the labour market (Hofäcker & Naumann, 2015;Lakomý, 2019), less involved in various types of social participation (Galenkamp et al, 2016;Serrat et al, 2015;Siegrist & Wahrendorf, 2009), and providing informal care more often (Hank & Buber, 2009;Igel & Szydlik, 2011;Rozanova et al, 2012). In sum, many studies indicated macro-or micro-contextual differences in the performance of activities supported by active ageing policy, but none of them describes their prevalence clearly and comprehensively.…”

Section: Prevalence Of Activities and Its Structuration By Regionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This paper considers the support of the same activities and expectation of the same outcomes regardless of macro-and micro factors as highly problematic. Many authors showed that the availability of these activities, their outcomes, and their meaning for older people differ substantially (Conkova, Fokkema, & Dykstra, 2017;Hank, 2011;Lakomý, 2019;Timonen, 2016;Walker, 2009). These differences can be explained by many factors structured in several theories.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Prevalence of activities in later life across European regions

Central European Journal of Public Policy

2020

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The active ageing policy supports several types of activities, including labour force participation, caregiving, social participation, and physical activity. The paper illustrates the prevalence of supported activities across individual characteristics and four supra-national European regions to assess how these activities are available for specific groups of older people. The analysis draws on wave 6 from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe held in 2015. A set of figures describes the availability of activities sorted by gender, age, health status, and the level of education in 17 European countries divided into four regions, and thus, presents the unavailable descriptive data important for researchers and policymakers. The results most of all show that the majority of the 50+ population engages in vigorous physical activity, whilst labour force participation and caregiving concern about one-third of it, and other activities much less. The findings show the inadequacy of the active ageing as a uniform context-insensitive EU policy and detect its potential for raising inequalities in later life, whilst the theoretical implications are discussed.

“…The beneficial effects of labour force participation (Di Gessa and Grundy, 2013;Kim and Moen, 2001;Lakomý, 2019) and informal caregiving (Di Novi et al, 2015;Neuberger and Haberkern, 2014;Potočnik and Sonnentag, 2013) as other pillars of active ageing are questioned by the cited literature. In contrast, the effects of social participation have been relatively well confirmed.…”

Section: Effect Of Social Participation and Its Conditioningmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

International Sociology

2021

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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.