The purpose of this proposal is to continue RAND's Center for the Study of Aging, an NIA-funded research and development (P30) center from 1999 to 2004, for another five years. The Center includes cores for administrative and research support (A), program development (B), external innovative network development (C), and external research resources support and dissemination (D). The Center supports research on the relationships between the economic status and well-being of persons in and approaching old age. This research is carried out by two P01 program projects and some three dozen separately funded individual projects. While these studies can make important individual contributions to the state of knowledge in this area, the P30 Center greatly increases their coordination, integration, productivity, and impact in numerous ways. For example, the P30 Center provides for the unified development of data and computing services needed by multiple projects. In particular, it has benefited RAND researchers and many others outside RAND by assembling and disseminating a user-friendly version of a major survey of older Americans, the Health and Retirement Study. That effort is ongoing. The Center also facilitates communication and cooperation across research projects through seminar series involving researchers outside RAND. It supports the development of research ideas with high potential but some risk into proposals for individually funded projects. The Center supports collaboration with researchers overseas, in particular with European efforts to conduct large social surveys of their older populations. The data from such surveys can permit comparisons of the effects of U.S. institutional supports for the elderly with alternatives in other developed countries. Finally, the Center aims to carry on its research communication function by familiarizing social scientists with the latest biomedical research on aging and by adapting research findings into briefs accessible and of interest to the broad policy community. The Center will continue taking advantage of the RAND institutional environment--including the many infrastructural resources related to computing, analysis, and dissemination. The coherence of the Center's activities and of the research it supports is enhanced through two means: centralizing the direction of all cores and the Center itself in one individual and establishing an oversight committee composed of the PI and distinguished scholars both from inside and outside RAND.
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