2.3 Data

To test the established hypotheses, we selected as target population elderly people (65 and over) living in the autonomous community of Castilla y León (Spain). We worked with the annual information provided by the autonomous community of Castilla y León, which details the official data on social services for the care of the elderly in the 9 provinces of the autonomous community during the last years (2007–2021).

The data has been provided through the web services offered by the Junta de Castilla y León from the portal “Datos abiertos de Castilla y León” (Open Data of Castilla y León). As indicated in its web portal, open data represents a philosophy and practice that aims to make certain data freely available to all people who require it, without restrictions of copyright, patents or other control mechanisms. This data must be published in its original, unprocessed form, well organized and in recognizable formats that facilitate its reuse. In this sense, the public sector generates a wide range of valuable information for citizens, businesses and research groups, ranging from social, economic, geographic, statistical and meteorological data to tourism and business information, as well as data on education. This information has characteristics that make it particularly attractive to the digital content sector, as it is complete, reliable and of high quality. The openness of public sector data allows any person or organization to build on them new ideas that generate additional data, knowledge, process improvements, added value to existing ones or even the creation of new services.

In this sense, we have used and processed the data corresponding to the social services (Junta de Castilla y León, 2022) belonging to the Gerencia de Servicios Sociales - Consejería de Familia e Igualdad de Oportunidades. The data can be downloaded in XLS and CSV format, so that they can be exported in their entirety to different computer tools for subsequent processing. The file with which we have worked offers statistical data on the main variables of the community’s social services that have been delimited to the target age groups of our study, such as those over 65 years of age.

It should be noted that the file contains raw data that had to be filtered to extract the variables necessary for our study, for which different routines were used to select the information we considered relevant and export it to a format that was readable and understandable by the analysis software used.

Table 1 presents the variables analysed in the study together with their assigned codes.

List of codes and variables related to social services for the elderly.

In addition, official data on life expectancy at birth from the European Statistical Office (Eurostat)¹ and the Spanish Statistical Office (INE)² were used to show the situation of older people. According to the United Nations, life expectancy is defined as “the number of years a newborn can expect to live if the age-specific mortality patterns prevailing at the time of birth remained the same throughout life.”

And, to find out about the possible benefits that currently exist for the elderly in the region under study, data from the Ministry of Social Rights and Agenda 2030³ were analyzed.