Integrating Information about Aging Surveys

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Abstract The goal of this renewal application is to continue and to enhance our current project, the Gateway to Global Aging Data (g2aging.org), a data and information platform developed to facilitate longitudinal and cross-country analyses on aging, especially those using the family of Health and Retirement Studies (HRS) around the world. The Gateway has indexed metadata from 12 surveys in 30 countries and has created 11,540 key harmonized variables on demographics, health, health care, cognition, financial and housing wealth, income, consumption, pension, retirement, employment history, and family structure, enabling cross-wave, cross-country search and analysis. We now have 1,486 registered users, in addition to numerous non-registered users from 165 countries who visit our site. Cumulatively, there have been 69,529 sessions, viewing a total of 593,107 pages. Prior to development of the Gateway, several barriers limited the use of HRS-family surveys for cross-wave and cross-country research. These included the difficulty of identifying concordance information, the need to merge multiple data files, dispersed documentation, and the lack of knowledge of what is available. The Gateway makes analyses of HRS-family surveys across time and countries much easier, lowering the costs of entry for new researchers and saving time and effort for experienced researchers. Our harmonized datasets have enabled users to build analysis datasets more accurately, easily, and quickly, generating an average time savings of 8 weeks per project for our users. Our registered users published 227 papers in the past two years, and even more users reported using the Gateway for their course work, conference presentations, and working papers for academic publications. In this application, we aim to incorporate additional longitudinal, harmonized variables which offer great scientific promise and are often requested by users, specifically those on biomarkers, disability, pension wealth and incentives to retire, social connectedness and isolation, psychosocial, next-of-kin interviews for the deceased, and life-history interviews. We also seek technological advancements in data structure and visualizations. We have developed a more aggressive outreach strategy in this application, including organizing pre/post conferences and methodological workshops on cross-country analysis; coordinating symposia; training users through user workshops and webinars; building an active and engaged user community through social media; continuing to disseminate through exhibits; and providing user support through our help desk. The proposed work will improve the information and the data we provide and lower the barriers to conducting longitudinal or cross-country research using HRS-family surveys, benefiting the larger research community. Exit data and life-history data, as well as other key variables, such as psychosocial variables, have never been harmonized. Incorporating these new data will expedite the speed of scientific discoveries in less-researched areas and offers great scientific promise.