Awareness, approval and completion of advance directives in older adults in Switzerland.

Background: Advance directives enable people to describe their preferences for medical treatment (living will) and/or to appoint a healthcare proxy who may decide on their behalf should they lose decision-making capacity. Advance directives are potentially important in determining the course of end-of-life care, as deaths are frequently preceded by end-of-life treatment decisions, which often require someone to make decisions on the patient's behalf. Switzerland introduced legally binding advance directives through its new child and adult protection law of 2013.

Parenthood and Well-Being: The Moderating Role of Leisure and Paid Work.

This study contributes to our knowledge on the association between parenthood and psychological well-being by examining whether pre-parenthood lifestyles (leisure and paid work) moderate the transition to parenthood. We expected that people with less active lifestyles would find it easier to adapt to the demands of parenthood. Using eleven waves of the Swiss Household Panel ( = 1332 men and 1272 women; 1999-2008, 2010), fixed effects models are estimated for men and women separately.

Impact of falling on social participation and social support trajectories in a middle-aged and elderly European sample.

Whereas falls are frequent and traumatic events for the elderly, their long-term consequences in terms of the social lives of older fallers are understudied. This study aimed to identify the impact of falling on the trajectories of social participation and social support of older people in Europe. Our sample consisted of 16,583 people aged 50-95 years from 10 European countries who responded to the waves 1, 2 and 4 of the Survey of Health Ageing and Retirement in Europe.