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The Expected, Evaluated, Perceived, Valued and Prevalent Social Roles of Older People: Are They by Consent?

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Building Evidence for Active Ageing Policies

Abstract

This chapter uses the Active Ageing Index (AAI) as an “operationalisation” of the active ageing paradigm and compares it with the perceived roles and contributions of older people and older peoples’ own preferences and prevalent role sets. The active ageing concept highlights productive roles such as worker, volunteer and care provider. However, the surveys show that older people are socially recognised primarily for their contributions as grandparents and providers of support for families. If the preferences of older people themselves are considered, the roles of grandparent, partner, friend and parent are attributed the highest value. The survey “Life roles (2014)” has shown that friend, parent, sibling and partner are the most prevalent roles. The discussion calls for strengthening the weight of the family roles within the AAI.

Acknowledgement: This work was supported by the Czech Scientific Agency under Grant number P404/13-34958S. “Role overload: Grandparenting in the Era of Active Ageing”.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Source: http://ec.europa.eu/social/main.jsp?catId=1062&langId=en

  2. 2.

    That is, the average answer on a 1- to 4-point scale, where 1 represented “very concerned” and 4 “not at all”, obtained in these countries was above 3 points; however, it was still less than 3.5 points; the overall average was 2.7 points; the average value of the indicator in the “very concerned” countries was around 2.3 points (author’s own calculations).

  3. 3.

    Source: http://ec.europa.eu/social/main.jsp?catId=1062&langId=en

  4. 4.

    Cf. National Strategic Policy for Active Ageing in Malta (online). Available from: https://activeageing.gov.mt/en/Pages/NSPAA.aspx (cit. 23 January 2015); or National Action Plan for Positive Ageing in the Czech Republic. Available from: http://www.mpsv.cz/files/clanky/22733/NAP_2013_2017.pdf

  5. 5.

    For example, lifelong learning = (10 p. indicator weight × 10 p. domain weight) = 100 points/(9825 sum of all points for all domains/100) = 1%. Other topics include grandparenting 9%; caring 9%; leisure 5%; environment 3%; finances 3%; and learning 1%.

  6. 6.

    These are, of course, perceived contributions as evaluated by the respondents in general, not actual amount of care and work provided by older people. We use this approach to proxy this information.

  7. 7.

    In some sense, caring roles are, today, often considered only as alternatives to paid services, and this rationale is used also in recent discussions on introducing carers’ leave and carers’ benefits (i.e. care as work) in the Czech Rep.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Social Studies, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic

    Lucie Vidovićová

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  1. Lucie Vidovićová
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Southampton, Southampton, United Kingdom

    Asghar Zaidi

  2. University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom

    Sarah Harper

  3. University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom

    Kenneth Howse

  4. INRCA National Institute of Health and Science on Aging, Ancona, Italy

    Giovanni Lamura

  5. Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Kraków, Poland

    Jolanta Perek-Białas

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Vidovićová, L. (2018). The Expected, Evaluated, Perceived, Valued and Prevalent Social Roles of Older People: Are They by Consent?. In: Zaidi, A., Harper, S., Howse, K., Lamura, G., Perek-Białas, J. (eds) Building Evidence for Active Ageing Policies. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-6017-5_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-6017-5_3

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