Archiving & Creating User Friendly Data: the Longitudinal Aging Survey in India

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The goals of this application are two-fold. First, we will archive data from the 2010 pilot survey of the Longitudinal Aging Study in India (LASI) and make them available through the RAND Survey Meta Data Repository (metadata.rand.org). Second, we will create a user friendly data set with derived variables that can facilitate secondary analysis (including cross-country analysis). LASI is designed to be a panel survey representing persons at least 45 years of age in India and their spouses regardless of age. The 2010 pilot survey was fielded in four states: Karnataka, Kerala, Punjab, and Rajasthan. These four states were chosen to capture regional variations as well as socioeconomic and cultural differences across India. LASI interviewed 1,683 individuals representative of these four states during October through December of 2010. The survey instrument has been designed to collect information that is conceptually comparable to the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) and its sister surveys in Asia, and includes variables on demographics; family structure and social network; health and health behaviors; health care utilization; work and pension; housing and environment; and income, assets, debts, and consumption. LASI also collected anthropometric and biometric measures, conducted physical and cognitive performance tests, and collects DBS specimens. The Survey Meta Data Repository is developed to facilitate cross-national analyses on aging, using the family of Health and Retirement Studies around the world. The project goals have been to complete a comprehensive digital library of survey questions and flow-charts; to provide an intelligent search engine that uses keywords, domains, and sub-domains; and to create a set of harmonized or identically defined variables. This repository also contains a library of contextual information and a Wiki system allowing researcher input. Currently, the system contains harmonized and easily searchable information on eleven health and retirement studies from 25 countries. Building on this innovative information system, our application seeks to archiving and creating a user friendly data from the 2010 LASI pilot survey for public use. Similar to RAND HRS, we will create a user friendly data by merging respondent-level data with spouse-level and household-level data. The resulting user friendly data with additional harmonized variables will create time savings for all researchers interested in using the LASI pilot data. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: In this project, we will archive and disseminate for use data from the pilot wave of the Longitudinal Aging Study in India (LASI), a multi-disciplinary survey, representative of adults at age 45 and older from the states of Karnataka, Kerala, Punjab, and Rajasthan. We develop a user-friendly data set for this, making it available for download from a secure website maintained by the RAND Survey Meta Data Repository. The publicly available data will enable analyses of the relationships among retirement, aging, and health both within India and between India and other nations. As such, this work can inform policy within India, in other developing countries in Asia, and in wealthy industrialized countries.