Slovakia is aging in front of our eyes and within a few decades it will change from the youngest to the oldest country in the European Union. The Institute for Public Affairs is responding to this irreversible process with far-reaching consequences with the release of a new publication. The ambition of the author's collective consisting of Zora Bútorová, Jarmila Filadelfiová, Oľga Gyárfášová, Grigorij Mesežnikov and Sylvia Šumšalová was to analyze the life situation of older people from several perspectives and also to show how they themselves and members of the younger generations perceive it. The book is a free continuation of the publication Štvrtý rozmer tretieho veku. Desať kapitol o aktívnom starnutí [The Fourth Dimension of the Third Age. Ten Chapters on Active Aging], published by the Institute for Public Affairs in 2013. Thanks to the systematic monitoring of the issue, not only a picture of the current state opens to the readers, but also long-term development trends are revealed.
Are you interested in how the Slovak public evaluates the status of older people and how the ranking of the most pressing problems that bother them has changed in recent years? Would you like to know how the public's views on the old age threshold have shifted under the influence of raising the retirement age? Is our public subject to age and gender stereotypes? What do people expect from retirement and how do recent retirees experience this milestone? Why are older women more at risk of poverty compared to men? What is the ranking of the most common activities that older people engage in? To what extent can we use the potential and experience of older people in Slovakia? How do our political parties approach the issue of older people? Have the principles of a fundamental political document such as the National Program for Active Aging for 2014-2020 been fulfilled?
Download: Starší ľudia medzi nami. Kde sme, kam smerujeme [Older People Among Us. Where We Are, Where We Are Going] [pdf]
The publication brings a lot of facts from demographic and economic statistics, as well as from domestic and international sociological research. It is based on large-scale representative research from August 2022 on a sample of 1,009 respondents aged 18 and over and on a sample of 575 respondents aged 55 and over, as well as on information obtained through interviews with representatives of senior organizations and moderated focus groups with people in pre-retirement and retirement age.
