Third report on the condition of the elderly in Italy (1993)

The survey starts from the assumption that the elderly person is still a social subject who claims to take an active part in social life, with the only difference being that his request follows channels of communication that are often marginalised by the emerging society, such as tradition, memory and values. The aim of this work was to focus and bring out this demand, by personally interviewing a sample of 1,500 elderly people distributed throughout the Country. The results that emerge allow us to draw a profile of the elderly condition in Italy, which in some ways modifies or corrects certain social prejudices and pre-constituted images of the third age, but at the same time also opens up new questions.
The Institute wanted to study the complexity of a social category that, because of its size and its cross-sectional nature, can no longer be relegated to the stereotypes of generic social marginalisation which are too often used when speaking about old age. Rather, the concept of marginalisation should be replaced by that of marginality, which primarily results in structural and welfare deficiencies.