Welfare, Wellbeing and Demographic Change: Understanding Welfare Models

The specific objectives of the EMMY project are:

1. to delineate the concept of mental wellbeing at old age and the links between welfare policies and such wellbeing,
2. to support the exchange of public policies with positive impacts on mental wellbeing at old age through thorough analysis of existing policies and
3. to develop a new research-based tool for assessing the mental wellbeing impact of welfare policies in old people.

Theoretical and instrumental conceptualization of mental wellbeing through participatory focus groups and by a review of instruments used to evaluate wellbeing in the ageing population. A set of gender balanced focus groups with elderly people aged 80+ with different levels of functioning, from each of the participating countries will explore what constitutes wellbeing with suggestions for improvement, building on previous focus group study by Forsman (2013). The nature and intent of the focus group will be explained to potential participants in writing and verbally, and signed consent will be obtained. A manual will guide the focus group procedures, providing open-ended questions for the sessions, and a case report form documenting sociodemographic information. The focus group meetings will be digitally recorded, documented by field notes to pick up features of the session outside the audio transcripts, transcribed verbatim and translated into English. Personal data will be recorded anonymously using identification codes. Data extraction will be performed for qualitative analysis.

Assessment the impact of welfare systems on mental wellbeing in old age, by studying their effect on subjective and personal wellbeing, social inclusion, empowerment, social capital, participation and wider structural determinants of mental health in old age.

Welfare regimes types will be identified using refined and extended versions of the Esping-Andersen typology of welfare regimens (Esping-Andersen 1990, 1999, Ebbinghaus 2012) with quantitative data from existing comparative datasets. Analysis of mental wellbeing among the elderly will be based on data on individual level from European Social Survey (ESS). ESS has been performed in 7 rounds and includes e.g. a core module of subjective wellbeing, social exclusion, religion, national and ethnic identity, as well as rotating modules covering topics relevant to mental wellbeing e.g. personal wellbeing in 2012 round. ESS covers all four partner countries, as opposed to e.g. SHARE or COURAGE data sets. System level variables will be derived from different sources such as ESS Multilevel Data, EU Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC), OECD Social and Welfare Statistics, Social Expenditure Database (SOCX), OECD Health Statistics, Comparative Welfare States Data Set, and Eurobarometers. Analyses will include all European countries in the ESS and respondents above 70 and 80 years (7800 and 2200, respectively). Separation between "young" and "old" elderly as well as using the rest of the adult population as reference group will contribute to interpretation of finding as being age specific or general difference among welfare models. A separation between general and age specific welfare policies will be done. The influence of welfare state regimes and welfare state indicators/dimensions will be performed by use of multilevel regression analysis.