Adding Contextual Data to the Health and Retirement Study

描述（由申请人提供）：该项目的目的是通过开发一个丰富的上下文数据资源与社会和物理环境的措施，将通知旨在优化老年人健康轨迹的干预措施，以增强健康和退休研究（HRS）的影响。社会环境背景可能在塑造老年人过上健康、积极、独立和积极生活的机会方面发挥重要作用。然而，缺乏大型的，有代表性的，前瞻性的老年人研究，包括居住环境的数据提出了一个艰巨的挑战，在这一领域的研究。HRS是美国最大的正在进行的老龄化研究，为将社会环境背景数据添加到现有的老龄化研究提供了理想的机会。在本申请中，我们提出：（1）收集一套背景数据集，这些数据集来源于公开的国家数据源，包含有关社会和物理环境的信息，这些信息可以使用地理标识符与HRS联系起来;（2）构建代表社会环境背景六个关键理论维度的测量指标-社会经济/人口结构、心理社会压力源、卫生保健、身体危害，设施和土地使用/建筑环境;以及（3）创建详细的文档以供将来的研究使用，描述次级数据的属性、用于创建链接数据文件的程序以及将与上下文数据文件一起分发的测量构造。该提案有许多创新，将产生一种新的背景数据资源，包括创建跨多年和不同空间尺度（如人口普查区、邮政编码、当地缓冲区）构建的计量。在HRS中添加上下文数据将为研究人员提供一个强大的数据库，用于分析环境条件对健康和老龄化的前瞻性影响，住宅流动性对老龄化相关结果的影响，以及老年人周围环境的变化方式。通过制作一个公开的数据集的过程，该项目还将建立将上下文数据添加到一个大型的，全国性的美国老年人研究的可行性。随着背景数据的增加，HRS的影响将大大增强，为研究人员，政策制定者和规划者，社区组织和公众提供了一个主要的数据资源，这将促进社区在塑造老龄化体验方面的作用的研究取得重大进展。目前在美国还没有关于老龄化和环境的可比数据集。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The purpose of this project is to enhance the impact of the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) by developing a rich contextual data resource with measures of the social and physical environment that will inform interventions designed to optimize health trajectories in older adults. Socioenvironmental contexts may play an important role in shaping opportunities for older adults to lead healthy, active, independent and engaged lives. However, lack of large, representative, prospective studies of older adults that include data on the residential environment presents a formidable challenge for advancing research in this area. The HRS is the largest ongoing study of aging in the U.S. and presents an ideal opportunity for adding data on the socioenvironmental context to an existing study of aging. In this application we propose to: (1) assemble a suite of contextual data sets derived from publicly available national data sources containing information on the social and physical environment that can be linked to the HRS using geographic identifiers; (2) construct measures representing six key theoretical dimensions of the socioenvironmental context - socioeconomic/demographic structure, psychosocial stressors, health care, physical hazards, amenities, and land use/built environment; and (3) create detailed documentation for use in future studies, describing the attributes of the secondary data, the procedures used to create the linked data files, and measurement construction to be distributed with the contextual data files. This proposal features many innovations which will result in a novel contextual data resource, including the creation of measures that have been constructed across multiple years and at different levels of spatial scale (e.g. census tract, ZIP code, local area buffer). The addition of contextual data to the HRS will provide researchers with a powerful database with which to analyze prospective effects of environmental conditions on health and aging, the effects of residential mobility on aging-related outcomes, and the ways environments change around older adults as they age in place. Through the process of producing a publicly available data set, this project will also establish th feasibility of adding contextual data to a large, national study of older Americans. With the addition of contextual data, the impact of the HRS would be significantly augmented, giving researchers, policymakers and planners, community-based organizations, and the public a major data resource that would facilitate significant advances in research on the role of communities in shaping the aging experience. There is currently no comparable data set on aging and the environment in the U.S.