SHARE, the longitudinal Survey of Health, Aging and Retirement in Europe, has collected two waves of interdisciplinary data on European citizens over the age of 50 in 2004/05 and 2006/07. About 35,000 individuals in 15 countries have been interviewed. Data collected include health variables, psychological variables, economic variables and social support variables. SHARE is designed after the US Health and Retirement Study (HRS) and the English Longitudinal Study of Aging (ELSA). Comparability with these surveys is a core target of SHARE. These efforts have been largely funded by the European Commission, with substantial additional funding by NIA. The European Commission has now secured funding for a third wave of data to be collected in 2008/09 under the condition that in addition to the core variables life histories of the respondents will also be collected. The life histories will summarize the most important life events and welfare state interventions which have taken place during the past. They are primarily designed to understand how different past welfare policies in Europe have affected current health and employment status of the respondents. The SHARE life history module is closely modeled after the ELSA life histories collected in 2007. Achieving comparability with HRS and ELSA takes three forms: (a) ex-ante harmonization of the survey instrument at the design phase;(b) harmonization of fieldwork procedures at the data collection stage;and (c) ex-post harmonization of variables that differ due to institutional differences across countries. This proposal aims at continuing the very successful collaboration between HRS and SHARE in harmonizing fieldwork procedures at the data collection stage. Due to the multi-country and multi-language nature of SHARE, the SHARE data are collected by different survey agencies in each country. These survey agencies have different backgrounds, skill levels and often idiosyncratic procedures, jeopardizing the comparability of the collected data in terms of response rates and actual answers, in particular to qualitative questions. In the first two waves, SHARE has therefore applied a central training approach, plus thorough fieldwork monitoring, the former subcontracted to the Survey Research Center (SRC) at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor which also runs the HRS training. We propose to continue and intensify this approach in the third wave, in order to achieve harmonization not only among the European SHARE member countries, but also between HRS and SHARE. Specifically, this application would finance the SRC's train-the-trainer program for the 2008/09 wave and certification of adherence to the trained methods through SRC.
Health outcomes vary a great deal across countries, between the US and Europe, but also within the European Union. This project will harmonize data on health policies and health outcomes in Europe with similar data in the US in order to better understand how past international health policy differences have shaped current health outcomes.
