Residential mobility as a strategy of quality of life in old people

Raúl Lardiés, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC)

To improve the Quality of Life (QoL) of old people has become a challenge for the managers of the services and public equipments and an academic subject of great interest for researchers. Moreover, the people live nowadays more years, in better economic and material conditions, which helps to understand the increasing residential mobility of this group of population. But few studies have investigated how the mobility and/or the migration (temporal or definitive) contributes to improve the different aspects from the life of the aged population from the global approach of the QoL. OBJECTIVE: The aim of this contribution is to know the influence of the residential mobility of the retired people on the different elements/dimensions of their life. It will be analyzed how their life conditions and the surroundings have been modified, the changes in the satisfaction with the dimensions of their QoL, in order to understand the meaning of the residential transfer in the QoL of this population. METHOD: The used methodology is qualitative and the results are obtained from the accomplishment of in depth-interviews with people with 60 and more years who have developed mobility from the city of Madrid towards other places in Spain. The analysis of the information will be made with the Atlas-ti programme. RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS: Factors pushing the residential mobility in these population are analyzed, depending on their sociodemographic characteristics, the family, the social contacts, the environmental conditions of the place of destination, and the distance between Madrid and the destination place. It is also important to know the consequences of the moves related to the QoL of this aged population, to see how the change of residence has affected the main dimensions of their QoL, their global satisfaction and their well-being.