Paths to Healthy and Active Ageing

Project description

The research program Paths to Healthy and Active Ageing emanate from multidisciplinary research on ageing, life style, participation in different socio-economic groups. The researcher coordinates both international and national databases and involves researchers from social science, humanities, and medical backgrounds. Prolonging one’s working life and promoting active and healthy ageing have been suggested as one solution to the demands of a growing elderly population. However, one must consider the risk of larger disparities in socioeconomic and health in later life. Therefore, our broad research questions were as follows:
• To what extent can a healthy and active life style promote physical and cognitive health in the later stage of life?
• Do we see patterns of increasing disparities in health, life style patterns and socio-economic conditions?
• What is the impact of work environment occupational complexity and employment history on the timing of retirement?

The research follows individuals over parts of the life course and analyzes influence of lifestyle on older people’s physical health and memory functions, using a combination of data collected by researcher at Umeå university, data from a national research register, and data from a European Project for the elderly, in 21 countries.
The challenges of population ageing raise questions about the responsibilities of individuals, families and public institutions for the health and living conditions of the elderly. Therefore, we examined how lifestyle and living conditions are affected by networks. We also aim to scrutinize if and in which contexts social, health, and economic disparities increase between different social groups, and how these differences are affected by lifestyle and employment during the life course. By comparing data from different countries, we were also able to analyze and determine how different welfare models provide conditions for an active and healthy ageing population.