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The older population is growing globally, and more so in some European countries. Aimed at enhancing the quality of life of older people, active ageing has been on the policy agenda in Europe since the beginning of the twenty-first century. Using a subsample of the European Quality of Life Survey consisting of individuals aged 65 and over living in 27 European countries we explore the effect of active ageing on subjective quality of life. The central argument of the paper is that active ageing is cumulative, consisting of a mix of various interconnected activities. Hence, when assessing the impact of active ageing on quality of life we include the whole collection of activities in which seniors engage and avoid limiting to a single activity. Latent Class Analysis is employed to find the mix of interconnected activities in which older adults engage. We identify three classes: home keepers (mainly engaging in housekeeping activities), carers (mainly engaged in caring, but also some housekeeping activities) and those engaged outside their homes (engaged primarily in paid or unpaid work). Multilevel regression models test the connection between the different strategies to remain active in later life on life satisfaction and happiness, the cognitive and affective indicators of subjective quality of life. Our results show that remaining active in later life does not always lead to improvements in subjective quality of life and that separate strategies to remain active in later life are at work to maintain life satisfaction and happiness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Measuring attitudes towards gender roles in comparative research is a challenging task. This paper aims at assessing the content validity and cross-cultural measurement invariance of the scales measuring attitudes towards gender roles in two large-scale comparative surveys, the International Social Survey Program 2002 and the World Values Survey 2005. The two scales are widely used in cross-cultural studies, they complement each other in measuring the complex concept of attitudes towards gender roles, and they cover an extensive number of European and non-European countries, allowing for the assessment of measurement invariance in different cultural settings. We assess the content by confronting the items included in the two surveys with the theoretical definitions employed by the literature, and we test for the cross-cultural measurement invariance by multigroup confirmatory factor analysis. According to our results, these scales are only partially valid in measuring the complex concept of attitudes towards gender roles. Moreover, the two scales are configural and metric invariant in all countries included in our analysis, but they are not scalar invariant. The two scales are suitable for testing relations between attitudes towards gender roles and other theoretically relevant concepts, but they are not useful for comparing the level of support for gender equality across countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of European Identity has gradually become central to social sciences in the past decades.The enlargement of the European Union, as well as the economic crises from a decade ago called into question the very idea of Europe as a polity, the legitimacy of the European project and the homogeneity of the European culture. Although many analyses study European Identity, most research focuses on the definition and measurement of European Identity within the EU member states. Due to the interest in European Identity within EU borders on the one hand, and the lack of comparable data on the other, the European Identity of all Europeans is rarely explored. To address this gap, we investigate the common understanding of Europeanness among those living in Europe.We define European Identity as ethnic/cultural identity as opposed to civic identity and analyse the measurement equivalence of the scale tapping European ethnic/cultural identity fielded by European Values Survey in 2017 in 30 European countries. The results point out to a common understanding of Europeanness among those living in Europe, in ethnic terms, not in cultural ones. Methodologically, the analyses proved that the scale is suitable for cross-national comparisons among countries, but the comparability should be refrained to comparing means of the scale across countries. The mode of data collection does not impact on the comparability of the scale in four of the six countries that used mixed modes of data collection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]