EN
In the developed countries aging processes create the need of scientific study on the social life of the elderly. One of the major difficulties in the study of elderly is the problem to scientifically determine the position of older people in the social structure. Most popular tools for studying the social structure are usually based on the category of the occupation. This fact creates the problem of determining the social position of the inactive, including the unemployed seniors. This "structural exclusion” calls for the methodological approaches that also take into account the entity that are currently outside the sphere of labor market. The paper presents the considerations focused on the issue of "placing" of seniors in the social structure based on the determination of the level of different forms of capital.