The SHARE-Israel Project is an NIA/NIH supported panel survey of adults aged 50 and older that has collected three waves of data since 2005 (N=2,591). It is the Israeli component of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe, a multidisciplinary, cross-national longitudinal data base that is harmonized with the Health and Retirement Study and its sister surveys. Thus far, the SHARE-Israel survey has added distinctive measures of the effects of delayed retirement, cumulative lifelong trauma and exposure to falling missiles, to the array of topics that are covered in the HRS/SHARE domain. The overall aim of the current project is to extend the analytic potential of the SHARE-Israel survey. Specifically, the project will: 1) add two further waves of data collection (in 2015-16 and 2017-18), 2) carry out cohort refreshment to maintain cross-sectional representation of the sample, 3) implement the collection of dried blood spots (DBS), 4) apply a newly designed ego-centered name-generating social network inventory, 5) enhance further examination of measures that are germane to social life in Israel and are of interest to American and international researchers and 6) test the use of Day Reconstruction Method (DRM), as will be done in the larger SHARE Project as part of the NIA strategy to harmonize the measurement of well-being across the globe, and to apply this approach to the full sample of SHARE-Israel in its fifth Wave, in 2017. The proposed extension is significant insofar as panel studies constitute the principal mechanism by which to identify varying trajectories toward good health in older age and they are the main apparatus through which to measure the impact of interventions, personal and/or societal, on the health of aging populations. Among the innovations in the current project is the collection of four biomarkers from the DBS samples: HbA1c, total cholesterol, C-reactive protein and Vitamin D. (Vitamin D is not yet produced in the HRS DBS collection). Paired with the rich socio-economic database of SHARE, the biomarker data will shed new light on the relations between chronic conditions common in old age and risk factors under various socio-economic conditions. In addition, the application of the new social network inventory will allow better understanding of network dynamics and will allow unique examination of their linkage with transfer behaviors (time and money). Implementation of the network inventory in the SHARE-Israel survey will also allow examination of the associations between named confidants and a wide range of sociodemographic, health and other variables. Yet another area of inquiry that will be enhanced as a result of extending the SHARE-Israel panel concerns the concomitants of difficult life events, harsh threats to one's health and risk of death, and their relation to healt outcomes over time, controlling for the many sociodemographic factors that are available in the data base. The SHARE-Israel data also provide analytic opportunities for examining the effect of immigration, and particularly late-life immigration, on health and health-related behaviors and outcomes.
Continuation of the SHARE-Israel project over four more years will extend the length of the panel from three to five waves. This extension will enhance the means by which to analyze the effects of several important variables, such as lifelong trauma, pension reform, exposure to falling missiles and other areas, on a wide range of health-related outcomes in late life. It will also allow new analyses based on new data- biomarkers derived from dried blood spots and information on social network ties obtained by means of a new name-generator-based tool. These additional actions will strengthen the harmonization between SHARE-Israel and the HRS and its sister surveys, thus expanding the research potential of its database, as well as its potential for policy- relevant cross-national comparisons
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