Conferences

The Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) is a multidisciplinary and cross-nationally comparable panel database of micro data on health, socio-economic status and social and family networks of more than 45,000 individuals aged 50 or over in 14 European countries and Israel. The data are available free of charge to the entire research community. Two waves of data have already been collected in 2004-05 and 2006-07, respectively. Data collected include health variables (e.g. self-reported health, health conditions, physical and cognitive functioning, health behaviour, use of health care facilities), bio-markers (e.g. grip strength, walking speed, body-mass index, peak flow), psychological variables (e.g. psychological health, well-being, life satisfaction), economic variables (current work activity, job characteristics, opportunities to work past retirement age, sources and composition of current income, wealth and consumption, housing, education), and social support variables (e.g. assistance within families, transfers of income and assets, social networks, volunteer activities). In addition, the SHARE data base features anchoring vignettes to adjust cross-national subjective data for differential item function. The survey’s third wave of data collection, SHARELIFE, will collect detailed retrospective life-histories of all panel respondents. Future waves of SHARE will include more biomarkers collected from dried blood spots and other measurement, such blood pressure. Methodologically, SHARE uses ex-ante harmonization of survey content as well as a common survey management system to ensure comparability across all participating countries.

This presentation aims at introducing the many innovations of SHARE in the realm of cross-nationally comparable health surveys to a wider audience and encouraging the use of the data in their own research. Some examples demonstrating the research potential will be shown.