This project would continue and extend NIA's support of ongoing work to improve the comparability of data on older populations in Europe and elsewhere. SHARE is designed after the US Health and Retirement Study (HRS) and the English Longitudinal Study of Aging (ELSA), and this support is intended to enhance harmonization within these datasets and enhance the comparability of these measures to those in other US datasets, as well as other datasets being collected both in the US and cross-nationally, such as the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES III), the Established Population for Epidemiological Studies of the Elderly (EPESE), and Longitudinal Aging Study of Amsterdam (LASA). SHARE has so far collected two waves of data on European citizens over the age of 50 in 2004/05 and 2006/07, when about 35,000 individuals in 15 countries were interviewed. A third wave is currently in the field and will be finished in summer 2009. A fourth wave is scheduled for 2010/2011. This sampling of older adults in a diverse array of countries is providing valuable information on morbidity and its relationship to socio-economic status and the social network of the elderly. Further, it will enhance our understanding how the vastly differing health care systems, pension and long-term care systems affect socio-economic status, health experiences and mortality of the aging populations. These activities will be advanced though alignment of instruments for data collection, uniformity in interviewing protocols, development of validation tools, and increasing the availability of cross-nationally comparable datasets for the research community. To this end, NIA wishes to contract with Mannheim University to support harmonization activities being undertaken by the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE).
