Aging & Social Change: Ninth Interdisciplinary Conference

Abstract

This paper focuses on the life quality of older Germans through the perspective of household determinants and concentrates in developing a new interpretation of life satisfaction and use it as an appropriate measurement for comprehensive quality of life and quality of life towards certain domain, which contain both objective and subjective indicators of individual. Furthermore, this paper considers the key determinants which are highly related with elderly life satisfaction with asking “among all the household related factors, which factor(s) impact on the life satisfaction of German older people significantly?” Meanwhile, this paper also measures the changes of household determinants which affect life quality over ten years, and additionally, finds the key factors in leading changes on life quality. In theoretical framework of this paper, a reinterpretation of term “life satisfaction” is presented through discussion on literature with a great validity and reliability. Following the assumptions, the basic cross-tabulation analysis and regression are used in this paper to analyze the correlation between life quality and household determinants. Meanwhile, age groups and health condition are controlled to measure the differences between age groups and between different health conditions. The data of this paper comes from three terms European Quality of Life Survey in 2007, 2012 and 2016 which contain numerous samples in Germany and collects information of individual’s life quality from different dimensions. 996 older Germans are drawn from the survey database for analysis to find the key determinants of their quality of life.