Aging & Social Change: Tenth Interdisciplinary Conference

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to make a critical assessment of the normative (or ideological) concept of ‘active ageing’. The paper focusses on the active ageing index developed in cooperation between the EU and the European Centre in Vienna. The active ageing index is constructed as four pillars or domains (employment, participation in society, independent and healthy living, and capacity and enabling environment for active aging), representing four different ideals of active ageing. However, so far central issues have been under-researched or neglected: (1) inequalities in active ageing within countries, and (2) interactions between the four pillars The aim of this paper is to show how class inequalities are structuring spill-over effects from one pillar or domain to another. Denmark, which ranks relatively high on the Active Ageing index in most domain, will function as our test-case and we will draw on survey data from several Danish survey data sets (Frivillighedsundersøgelsen and Ældredatabasen), government documents, as well as administrative data.