Quality of Life in the third age: a descriptive analysis

The observed increase in life expectancy in Europe has resonably caused an ongoing increase in the study of quality of life in the third age, giving special emphasis on finding those determinant factors that may establish or provide a high quality of life for the elderly. The present paper 1 investigates the measurment of the quality of life of individuals that are aged 50 and over, with data drawn from the latest available wave from the Share project and its possible relation to a number of socio-demographic variables for all participating countries

The structure of the present paper is the following. Section 2 presents the data and variables that will be used later on in the analysis, whereas Section 3 and 4 provide respectively the results and the conclusions of the study.

Data and Variables
The data that will be used in the present analysis is the raw data of the latest available data, i.e. the fifth wave of the Helath, Ageing and Retirement in Europe Survey  are not ideological constructions but are real and based on the theory of primal needs, that they must be wholly satisfied, the first two constructs of the CASP-19 and CASP-12 scales, were constructed (control and autonomy).

Measuring Quality of Life
Generally, the indicator is based upon four constructs that are related to quality of life:  Control: which relates to the ability of an individual to move effectively within his/her environment.
 Autonomy: reflects the ability to distance oneself from undesirable factors that act outside his/her environment.
 Pleasure: corresponds to the feeling of satisfaction that derives from desirable activities, and  Self-realisation: is built through the satisfaction deriving from the personal evolution and success of an individual, the satisfaction, fulfilment or happiness as a result of fully developing one's potential. The self-realisation construct corresponds to the process of development of the individual that aims to deploy wholly one's abilities.
For each of the constructs, three questions are asked, and each one is rated by an ascending 1 to 4 scale. Therefore, the total score of the indicator records values that range from 12 to 48. Table 1 presents the questions that the individuals are asked to answer. Here is a list of statements that people have used to describe their lives or how they feel. We would like to know how often, if at all, you think they apply to you. Apparently, to examine whether there are specific patterns of quality of life one needs first to estimate the sum scores among all countries and to reverse the values of all positively worded items, in order to achieve correspondence between the ordering of the response categories. Table 2 presents the CASP-12 scale's Cronbach's alpha for all countries participating in SHARE and the mean CASP-12 scores by country and gender for wave 5.
Differences between countries are highly significant at p<0.001, (Independent Samples, Kruskal -Waliis Test). It can easily be seen that quality of life scores are comparatively high for Denmark, Switzerland and the Netherlands and comparatively low for Italy, Czech Republic and Estonia.    Table 3 presents the mean CASP-12 scores for these four geographical regions (Northern, Southern, East and West Europe) by gender, age categories, number of children, current health situation, the feeling of depression and loneliness that the individuals feel, the trust the individuals show in people, the frequency of praying as a measuremnet of their sense of religiocity and finally the self-rated political beliefs of the respondents. Source: SHARE-project: sharew5_rel1-0-0_ac.sav, * Self-perceived health, **" EURO-D Depression scale, *** Short version of R-UCLA loneliness scale

Conclusions
As far as gender-based differences in quality of life are concerned we notice that only women in Northern coutries score similar values as men, whereas in all other regions they score lower than men, with the Southern European countries exhibiting the higher difference.
In all four regions, as expected, individuals that are older (the 'oldest old category' of 75+) score lower than others, while the number of children doesn't seem to influence quality of life, in the 'zero to two (0-2) children' category and the 'three to five (3)(4)(5)' one. In the other two categories of number of children (6-8 and 9+), we observe a drop in the mean CASP-12 scores in all four regions.
Another factor that seems to play a rather important part in quality of life is depression, since there is a significant drop in the CASP-12 scores if the individual feels depressed. Respondents that don't feel depressed score higher in the CASP-12 scale. This is also true for the feeling of loneliness and the trust in other people for all regions.
As far the frequency of preying is concerned differences are observed only in the Southern European countries, where respondents that prey more frequently seem to score higher on the CASP-12 scale.
In these countries the political beliefs of the respondents don't seem to play a significant role. On the contrary, in the Northern and Eastern European countries individuals that place themselves left on the political scale are less satisfied with their life, whereas in the other two groups of countries the differences are not that obvious.