The active ageing approach supports a set of roles or activities that are supposed to be beneficial for older adults. This paper reassesses the benefits of activities for the quality of life by (a) analysing many activities at the same time to control each other, (b) using panel data to detect the effects of activities over time, and (c) performing separate analyses for four European regions to test the context-specificity of the effects. The effects of roles in later life are tested on panel data from three waves of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) project. The results of fixed-effects regression show that only some activities – volunteering, participating in a club and physical activity – increase the quality of life, and that care-giving within the household has the opposite effect. Moreover, the beneficial effects are much weaker and less stable than the other types of regression suggest; they are beneficial only in some regions, and their effect is much weaker than the effects of age, health and economic situation. Therefore, the active ageing approach and activity theory should reflect the diverse conditions and needs of older adults to formulate more-context-sensitive and less-normative policy recommendations.

积极老龄化方法支持一系列被认为对老年人有益的角色或活动。本文通过 (a) 同时分析许多活动以相互控制，(b) 使用面板数据检测活动随时间的影响，以及 (c) 执行单独分析，重新评估活动对生活质量的好处四个欧洲地区测试效果的上下文特异性。角色对晚年生活的影响是根据欧洲健康、老龄化和退休调查 (SHARE) 项目的三波面板数据进行测试的。固定效应回归的结果表明，只有一些活动——志愿服务、参加俱乐部和体育活动——可以提高生活质量，而家庭内部的照顾会产生相反的效果。而且，与其他类型的回归所显示的有益效果相比，其有益效果要弱得多，也更不稳定；它们只对某些地区有益，其作用远弱于年龄、健康和经济状况的影响。因此，积极老龄化方法和活动理论应该反映老年人的不同条件和需求，以制定更贴近情境和更不规范的政策建议。