Background. In the beginning of the 21st century, the world summit on population taking place in Madrid approved active ageing, WHO (2002) as the main objective of health and social policies for old people. Few studies have been done on the scientific validity of the construct. This study aims to validate the construct of active ageing and test empirically the WHO (2002) model of Active Ageing in a sample of community-dwelling seniors. Methods. 1322 old people living in the community were interviewed using an extensive assessment protocol to measure WHO's determinants of active ageing and performed an exploratory factor analysis followed by a confirmatory factor analyses. Results. We did not confirm the active ageing model, as most of the groups of determinants are either not independent or not significant. We got to a six-factor model (health, psychological component, cognitive performance, social relationships, biobehavioural component, and personality) explaining 54.6% of total variance. Conclusion. The present paper shows that there are objective as well as subjective variables contributing to active ageing and that psychological variables seem to give a very important contribute to the construct. The profile of active ageing is expected to vary between contexts and cultures and can be used to guide specific community and individually based interventions. 1. Introduction The World Health Organization (WHO) defines active ageing as “… the process of optimizing opportunities for health, participation, and security in order to enhance quality of life as people age” [1]. The emergence of this concept back in the 1990s developed through the WHO and several other governmental and nongovernmental organization initiatives offers a policy framework that emphasizes the link between activity, health, independence, and ageing well. In being of unquestionable importance as a key policy concept, efforts to add some empirical evidence on its operative definition and criteria are still scarce. As a potential variation of other terms used interchangeably in the gerontological literature as positive and productive ageing, the interpretation of active ageing often focuses on the labour market participation anchored in an economic framework [2] or in a perspective strongly health oriented, though the WHO does take an multidimensional approach and a broad view of “health.” In fact, for many years WHO used to talk about healthy ageing, considering primary ageing without major pathologies, and only in the XXI century this concept was substituted by the more comprehensive
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