Changes and challenges: household related life satisfaction of older people in Germany

Xiangjun Ren, Universität Hamburg

This paper focuses on analyzing the changes on overall life satisfaction of older people in Germany in a decade’s period (from 2003 to 2012) through a vision of household determinants. The main research question is how do changes in household determinants lead to negative impact on life satisfaction of German old cohort. “Life Satisfaction” is an important indicator of life quality which has been considered as subjective self evaluation on satisfaction level of both individual’s objective living condition and subjective well-being. Household determinants in this study include accommodation, household income, marital status, housework, care giving and relationship with relatives. This research measures the changes on household determinants and life satisfaction level, exhibits the relationship between changes on household determinants and life satisfaction of old cohort, which is different with most quality of life research, and then indicates the challenge in the future. This paper is a quantitative research, its data comes from three terms European Quality of Life Survey (EQLS) in 2003, 2007 and 2012, which provide massive samples for time series analysis and show how older cohort’s life satisfaction change in company with the changing of household determinants in Germany. A basic cross-tabulation analysis is widely used in this paper to analyze the correlation between variables and to expose the differences between age groups and gender. The result of regression analysis in this paper explains the relationship between life satisfaction and the change of each factor in old cohort’s family life.