This project will continue the efforts that NIA has financed in earlier waves in order to maintain and improve the comparability of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) with its sister surveys, especially the US Health and Retirement Study (HRS). It will add measures into SHARE which are already contained in those surveys and implement HRS-style training and survey management in SHARE. The project is part of a broader agenda to support research on individual and population aging which combines three elements, namely (1) international comparisons based on cross-nationally harmonized data, (2) measurement of health as objective as possible in large-scale social surveys, and (3) life-course data from early childhood onwards, in order to better understand the effects of health care, economic and social policy on health and other outcomes at older ages. The essential argument for cross-national analysis is that the variety of circumstances and policies is in general much larger across countries than within a single country. Researchers can learn from what has happened and what has been tried elsewhere. More fundamentally, the impact of health, economic and social policies can only be understood if we observe one policy in contrast to other policies. Comparability of measures across studies is essential for such cross-national research. Comparability is achieved by measuring the same concepts in all sister surveys and by using survey methods that achieve comparable outcomes. This proposal addresses both dimensions by filling strategic gaps in the SHARE survey content and by harmonizing central aspects of the survey methodology. The emphasis on objective measures of health and physical activity as important outcome measures is based on the desire to minimize the inter-personal and inter-cultural variation in interpreting questions and response categories in a social survey. This project therefore stresses the harmonization of physical performance tests, employing grip strength, chair stand, peak expiratory flow, and accelerometry, and a large array of harmonized cognitive performance tests. The emphasis on early childhood and other life-course variables follows from the insight of recent research that cross-national differences in health care delivery systems, economic and social policies manifest their effects starting very early in life and then accumulate in positive and negative feedback cycles over the entire life course before they determine later-life health, economic and social outcomes. The proposed project will fit in the long-run agenda of the SHARE panel which will administer a life- history module in Wave 7 and a cognition module in Wave 8. Funding is restricted to the marginal costs of those additional data collection efforts that are needed to bring the regular SHARE data closer in line with its sister surveys, especially HRS.
The harmonization efforts in this project will create a powerful laboratory-like instrument to analyze changes in health, socio-economic status, and economic behavior as populations age. Its power comes from the fact that the combination of the US HRS and its European sister surveys SHARE and ELSA encompasses a large array of policies and life circumstances. This permits detailed investigations of the causes for the differential compression of morbidity in aging populations, the differential changes of mortality and other health and economic outcomes in countries with different health care delivery systems and different economic and social policies.
