Microdata for Research on Aging in the Global South

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Project Summary/Abstract Over the past two decades, the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) has created a vast database of microdata covering most of the globe from the 1960s to the present. These data include detailed information about each person's geographic location, demographic characteristics, and economic activities as well as information on mortality, migration, disabilities, living arrangements, and housing features. IPUMS is currently disseminating integrated data on approximately one billion persons drawn from 355 censuses of 89 countries, including 212 censuses of 60 countries in the Global South. The data are interoperable across time and space, enabling comparative analysis and the study of processes of change. This proposal seeks funding to expand the scope of the IPUMS database and create powerful new tools for analyzing population aging. The project has four major goals: (1) Expand the database, adding 40 censuses and approximately 100 million cases for countries in the Global South; (2) Develop new individual-level variables on disability, mortality, retirement, types of group quarters, familial living arrangements, migration, and economic well-being indicators; (3) Develop new contextual variables describing environmental and socioeconomic characteristics of approximately 15,000 places at the second administrative level in the Global South; and (4) Provide user support, training, and outreach to population aging researchers to ensure that the data are broadly accessible and widely used. Leveraging billions of dollars of investments in census data, this project is a highly cost-effective use of scarce resources to develop shared big data infrastructure for research, education, and policy-making on population aging. The proposed database directly addresses core goals of the Population and Social Processes Branch of NIA by providing a resource of unprecedented power for understanding the effects of public policies, social institutions, and environmental conditions on the health, well-being, and functioning of people over the life course and in their later years across the developing world.