The Age.Vol.A. research project: Findings from a survey on caregivers, the elderly and their families in Northern Italy

In 2019, 20.3% of the EU-27 population was aged 65 and over. The share of EU people aged 80 years or above is projected to have a two and a half fold increase between 2019 and 2100, reaching 14.6 % of the total (United Nations, 2019). Italy is facing a demographic decline. According to ISTAT (2019), the country’s birth rate has constantly decreased over the past few decades: for every 100 deaths there are just 67 births (there were as many as 96 births 10 years ago), which is the lowest turnover population level since 1918. This phenomenon, combined with the increased life expectancy in Italy (almost 81 years for men and over 85 for women), paints a picture of a country where the average age of the population is 45.7 years old and is expected to be over 53 years old in 2050 (Lallo and Raitano 2018). For these reasons, elderly care plays a key role in Italy’s social fabric: if people live longer, the extra years will not necessarily be spent in good health, which means that the demand for assistance, especially home care, will increase in the next decades. A large share of the population is expected to spend more time looking after their elderly family members, which might result in a negative impact on their working lives, an aspect which has emerged significantly during the present COVID-19 pandemic (Petretto and Pili, 2020). This presentation introduces Age.Vol.A.– Ageing, Volunteers, Assistants. Multilingual tools for Assisting the Ageing, a research project on ageing issues focusing on the demographic and social situation of Varese, an 80,000-inhabitant city in North-West Italy, with 13% of its population over 65 and foreigners representing over 8% of the province’s population, a significant proportion of whom is employed as caregivers to assist elderly people at home. Age.Vol.A. starts from the assumption that, between home-assisted Italian seniors and their non-Italian caregivers, there exists a linguistic and cultural barrier as well as a digital divide, which tends to increase the physical and social isolation of the elderly population. The output of this research project will be a multilingual website and a multilingual smartphone application aimed at providing the foreign carers with terminology and practical information related to their assisted and the institutions aimed to assist those who assist the elderly, from health and healthcare to administrative issues (Russo et al. 2019; Vicentini and Grego 2019; Vicentini et al. 2020;). The paper intends to offer an overview of the data collected in a survey launched in 2020 by the Age.Vol.A. project to study the populations of caregivers, the assisted elderly and their families in the province of Varese, which takes into account specific demographic, social, linguistic and communicative aspects, including the current epidemiological situation. References ISTAT (2019), Natalità e fecondità della popolazione residente, https://www.istat.it/it/files/2020/12/REPORT-NATALITA-2019.pdf Lallo, C., Raitano, M. (2018). “Life expectancy inequalities in the elderly by socioeconomic status: evidence from Italy”. Population health metrics, 16(1), 7. Petretto, D. R., Pili, R. (2020). Ageing and COVID-19: What is the role for elderly people?. Geriatrics (Switzerland), 5(2). Russo, D., Luraschi, M., Grego, K., Vicentini, A., Pasquaré Mariotto, F., Rovelli, G. (2019) “Designing a Survey for Care Workers, the Elderly and Their Families”, presentation at the conference Seniors, foreign caregivers, families, institutions: Linguistic and multidisciplinary perspectives, University of Insubria, Varese, Italy, 9-10/04/2019. United Nations (2019). World Population Ageing 2019 https://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/publications/pdf/ageing/WorldPopulationAgeing2019-Report.pdf Vicentini, A., Grego, K. (2019) (eds) “Linguistic perspectives on ageing issues, ethics and ideology”, Expressio, 3. Vicentini, A., Grego, K., Russo, D., Grechi, D., Pasquaré-Mariotto, F. & Rovelli, G. (2020). “Sociolinguistic and statistical methods to improve health communication between the elderly, caregivers and institutions: The Age.Vol.A. research project”. presentation at the conference Communication, Medicine and Ethics Conference (COMET) 2020, Aalborg (DK), 01-03/07/2020.