Do different ageing patterns exist in different European areas, and is there a difference between East and West? To study the distinctive patterns of ageing by gender, and education in 16 European countries, Warren C. Sanderson and Sergei Scherbov use prospective ages in place of chronological ages. Prospective ages take changes in life expectancy into account. Prospective ages are based on how many years people have ahead of them, while chronological age is the number of years people have already lived.

Living conditions can affect the quality of life of older people in two different ways. The first is objective and regards the characteristics of dwellings. The second, instead, is subjective and respond to elder’s perceptions of how they accomplish the fulfilment of their needs. Both, together with their individual characteristics, build what has been defined as “residential satisfaction”. In their study Celia Fernández-Carro, Juan A. Módenes and Jeroen Spijker analyse both the levels of residential satisfaction and its determinants among older Europeans.

Population ageing has recently boosted an extensive debate about how to measure individual aging. The chronological age, even if conventionally used, is somehow limited because it does not capture people’s own representation of aging, that is, how old people actually feel they are. In their study on the United States, Valeria Bordone and Bruno Arpino test the association between subjective age, as an alternative measure to chronological age, and two important social roles for older adults: having grandchildren and providing grandchild care.