Attitudes to Aging Questionnaire

The Attitudes to Ageing Questionnaire (AAQ) measures how older adults perceive their own experience of growing older, capturing self-directed attitudes rather than younger people's stereotypes of the old. Developed by Ken Laidlaw, Mick Power, Silke Schmidt, and the WHOQOL-OLD Group and published in 2007, it was created within the World Health Organization's cross-cultural quality-of-life programme to fill the absence of a multidimensional, older-person-centred attitude measure. The questionnaire contains 24 self-report items, eight per subscale, spanning three domains: psychosocial loss, physical change, and psychological growth. Respondents rate agreement on a Likert scale, and items are summed within each domain so that higher scores indicate a more positive attitude to ageing. Crucially, the AAQ treats ageing as having both negative and genuinely positive aspects, so the growth subscale recognizes wisdom and development rather than framing ageing only as decline. It was validated across many countries and has become a standard tool for studying self-perceptions of ageing and their links to well-being.