Enhancing the Comparability of SHARE with HRS and ELSA

 描述(由申请人提供)：该项目将继续NIA在前几波中资助的努力，以保持和改善欧洲健康、老龄化和退休调查(SHARE)与其姊妹调查，特别是美国健康和退休研究(HRS)的可比性。它将把已经包含在这些调查中的措施添加到Share中，并在Share中实施HRS式的培训和调查管理。该项目是支持个人和人口老龄化研究的更广泛议程的一部分，该议程结合了三个要素，即：(1)基于跨国家统一数据的国际比较；(2)在大规模社会调查中尽可能客观地衡量健康状况；(3)从儿童早期开始的生命历程数据，以便更好地了解保健、经济和社会政策对老年人健康和其他结果的影响。跨国分析的基本论点是，总体而言，不同国家之间的情况和政策的多样性比单一国家内的要大得多。研究人员可以从已经发生的事情和其他地方尝试的事情中学到东西。更根本的是，只有将一项政策与其他政策相对照，才能了解卫生、经济和社会政策的影响。不同研究的测量方法的可比性对于这种跨国研究至关重要。可比性是通过在所有姊妹调查中衡量相同的概念并使用取得可比结果的调查方法来实现的。该提案通过填补份额调查内容中的战略空白并协调调查方法的中心方面，解决了这两个方面的问题。强调将健康和体力活动的客观衡量作为重要的成果衡量标准，是基于希望尽量减少在解释社会调查中的问题和回答类别方面的个人间和文化间差异。因此，该项目强调协调身体性能测试，采用握力、椅子站立、呼气峰值流量和加速度法，以及大量协调认知性能测试。对幼儿期和其他生命过程变量的重视源于最近一项研究的洞察，即各国在保健提供系统、经济和社会政策方面的差异从很小的时候就开始显现其影响，然后在整个生命过程中在积极和消极反馈循环中积累，然后决定以后的健康、经济和社会结果。拟议中的项目将符合SHARE小组的长期议程，该小组将管理第7波中的生活史模块和第8波中的认知模块。资金仅限于那些额外数据收集工作的边际成本，这些额外数据收集工作是使定期分享数据更接近其姊妹调查，特别是HRS所需的边际成本。

 DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This project will continue the efforts that NIA has financed in earlier waves in order to maintain and improve the comparability of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) with its sister surveys, especially the US Health and Retirement Study (HRS). It will add measures into SHARE which are already contained in those surveys and implement HRS-style training and survey management in SHARE. The project is part of a broader agenda to support research on individual and population aging which combines three elements, namely (1) international comparisons based on cross-nationally harmonized data, (2) measurement of health as objective as possible in large-scale social surveys, and (3) life-course data from early childhood onwards, in order to better understand the effects of health care, economic and social policy on health and other outcomes at older ages. The essential argument for cross-national analysis is that the variety of circumstances and policies is in general much larger across countries than within a single country. Researchers can learn from what has happened and what has been tried elsewhere. More fundamentally, the impact of health, economic and social policies can only be understood if we observe one policy in contrast to other policies. Comparability of measures across studies is essential for such cross-national research. Comparability is achieved by measuring the same concepts in all sister surveys and by using survey methods that achieve comparable outcomes. This proposal addresses both dimensions by filling strategic gaps in the SHARE survey content and by harmonizing central aspects of the survey methodology. The emphasis on objective measures of health and physical activity as important outcome measures is based on the desire to minimize the inter-personal and inter-cultural variation in interpreting questions and response categories in a social survey. This project therefore stresses the harmonization of physical performance tests, employing grip strength, chair stand, peak expiratory flow, and accelerometry, and a large array of harmonized cognitive performance tests. The emphasis on early childhood and other life-course variables follows from the insight of recent research that cross-national differences in health care delivery systems, economic and social policies manifest their effects starting very early in life and then accumulate in positive and negative feedback cycles over the entire life course before they determine later-life health, economic and social outcomes. The proposed project will fit in the long-run agenda of the SHARE panel which will administer a life- history module in Wave 7 and a cognition module in Wave 8. Funding is restricted to the marginal costs of those additional data collection efforts that are needed to bring the regular SHARE data closer in line with its sister surveys, especially HRS.