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How to measure “productive ageing”? Eliciting scales for multidimensional concepts through a conjoint experiment on experts
Ginevra Floridi

##manager.scheduler.building##: Velodromo - Bocconi University
##manager.scheduler.room##: N02
Date: 2019-01-26 09:00 AM – 10:30 AM
Last modified: 2018-12-26

Abstract


Composite measures are commonly used to operationalize multidimensional concepts. However, aggregating indicators into a scale that adequately reflects their importance towards the concept is a difficult task. We propose a method for supervised measurement based on a conjoint experiment on experts, and apply it to the concept of “productive ageing”. We ask academics with expertise in productive ageing to complete a series of pairwise comparisons on hypothetical profiles of older people participating in different combinations of productive activities, and to different extents. By ranking profiles in the pair as more, similarly or less productive relative to each other, the experts implicitly reveal the weights to place on each activity. We model responses on the full set of activities, revealing their relative weights, and use these to construct a scale. The proposed method generates highly reliable scales, and performs well compared to data-driven approaches for weighting and aggregation. The method allows us to assess differences in the operationalization of productive ageing between a group of Italian and a group of South Korean academics, by constructing separate scales by expert and country of origin. The results suggest that socio-cultural factors may influence academics’ definition and formalisation of productivity in later life


Keywords


Measurement; conjoint experiment; productive ageing