Effects of digital skills and other individual factors on retirement decision-making and their gender differences.

Increasing the pension age as a dominant solution to population ageing does not bring desirable outcomes, if not accompanied by other essential measures in lifelong learning and fighting age discrimination. Moreover, rapid digitalisation and automation in the labour market bring additional uncertainties for the growing group of older workers. The analysis is based on the SHARE data from Waves 5, 6, and 7 and examines predictors of retirement intentions by two different estimation methods. While digital skills are positively associated with a willingness to stay in the labour market in the random-effect modelling, fixed-effects regression shows no correlation between digital skills and retirement intentions. This difference means that digital skills do not correlate with retirement intentions once we control for time-invariant individual characteristics. Thus, increasing ICT literacy among older workers can have a very limited potential for extending working lives. In contrast to this result, starting to be self-employed, health improvement, having an additional grandchild, and losing a partner increase the willingness to work longer. The study identifies the factors shaping retirement intentions, which should be reflected in any effective social policy.

The motivation for citizens' involvement in life sciences research is predicted by age and gender.

Open Science is an umbrella term encompassing multiple concepts as open access to publications, open data, open education and citizen science that aim to make science more open and transparent. Citizen science, an important facet of Open Science, actively involves non-scientists in the research process, and can potentially be beneficial for multiple actors, such as scientists, citizens, policymakers and society in general. However, the reasons that motivate different segments of the public to participate in research are still understudied. Therefore, based on data gathered from a survey conducted in Czechia, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden, and the UK (N = 5,870), this study explores five types of incentives that can motivate individuals to become involved in life sciences research. The results demonstrate that men and younger individuals are more persuaded by extrinsic motives (external benefits or rewards), as compared with women and older people, who are driven by intrinsic motives (that originates from within an individual). This paper shows that specific strata of the population are differentially motivated to engage in research, thereby providing relevant knowledge for effectively designing public involvement activities that target various groups of the public in research projects.

The effects of prolonged working life on subjective quality of life across Europe.

This paper examines the effect of prolonged working careers on subjective quality of life (QoL) in four European regions. The paper tests a basic assumption of the role accumulation theory and the active ageing approach that additional roles, including prolonged working careers, are beneficial for the quality of life of older people. The propensity score matching method was used on data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) for four European regions with distinctive economic, institutional, and cultural contexts connected to paid work. The context-sensitive effects of prolonged labour force participation on QoL as a whole, control, and pleasure are positive in regions in which financial need serves as a more important motivation to work than nonmaterial need. In contrast, the effects on QoL as a whole and autonomy are negative in wealthier and more developed European regions. The paper concludes that the main motivation for prolonged working careers seems to be to avoid deteriorating living standards; satisfactory retirement conditions should thus be an aim complementary to incentives for those who are willing and able to work longer.

Full-time versus part-time employment: Does it influence frequency of grandparental childcare?

The impact of grandparents' employment on grandparental childcare has been examined repeatedly, but the findings have so far been inconsistent. We contend that these inconsistencies may have resulted from variations in model specification and crude measurement of employment status. Furthermore, we assert that earlier research overlooked gender differences in the ability to combine paid employment and caregiving as well as variations between maternal and paternal grandparents. We also question the causal interpretation of earlier findings that were based on cross-sectional data. We revisit the issue of the impact of the intensity of employment and analyze SHARE data from 19 countries. We find a significant positive association between part-time employment (as compared to full-time employment) and the frequency of grandparental childcare in a cross-sectional sample, but only among paternal grandmothers. Capitalizing on the panel component of SHARE, we use a within-person estimator to show that this association is unlikely to reflect a causal effect of the intensity of labor market attachment on the frequency of the care of grandchildren, but more probably results from omitted variable bias. We argue that grandparents most likely to provide (intensive) childcare are also most likely to adjust their employment in anticipation of caregiving. The paper documents the usefulness of role strain theory among grandparents and highlights that part-time jobs may reduce role conflict and may thus make grandparenting a more easily manageable experience.