LSCR Summer School Day 2

Themes in Ageing, Well-Being and Health

Program of the second day of the School  consisted of two educational modules given by Peter Schmidt on Confirmatory Factor Analysis and Eduard Ponarin on multi-level modelling in R. There was also a report section entitled "Successful aging, health and social status" with four presentations.

Vladimir Kozlov demonstrated progress in his work "Perception of Ageing and the Third Age". To put it briefly his project is devoted to the influence of the age and cohort on the subjective well-being (SWB).

Julia Zelikova presented final report on her project "Subjective Well Being in the Late Life period". Main findings of her research are the following. First of all gender does not affect the level of SWB among older people but marital status and education do affect it significantly positively and also religiosity has a negative effect on it. Concerning cross-national differences each country has some peculiarities in this respect but post-communist countries have a significantly lower level of SWB than all others.

Comparison of the level of SWB of older and younger people shows that gap between these two indicators does not depend on economic development. Another interesting result is that in Protestant countries differences in the level of SWB between oldest and youngest are bigger than ones in other countries. Julia hypothesizes that higher level of political development of protestant countries might explain this fact. For example, active participation of women increases SWB for younger women but does not affect SWB of older women, and in general older people benefit as much as younger from these effects so their SWB does not increase. It is interesting that in this respect communist experience diminishes this gap.  

Finally new project were presented by Natalia Levchuk (Institute for Demography and Social Studies, National Academy of Science, Ukraine) and  Judith Goncalves  (University of Geneva). Natalia's project is devoted to the exploration of impact of household and family environment on self-rated health of older people in Ukraine and Judith aims to investigate effects of home care policy on health care use in Switzerland.

by Boris Sokolov