Conference on Aging in Developing Countries: Building Integrated Research Agendas

申请者描述(由申请者提供)：本申请申请为期一年，以举办一次关于发展中国家(中低收入国家)老龄化问题的科学会议。这次会议的一个独特之处在于，它将汇聚来自亚洲、拉丁美洲和非洲等全球不同国家的学者。来自发达国家的学者将被包括在内，以促进发达国家/发展中国家研究人员之间的合作，分享在不同环境下收集数据的经验，讨论世界两个区域老龄化进程的异同，并鼓励和提供进行系统比较研究的指导方针。这次会议是及时的，因为它将利用发展中国家和发达国家在收集老年人数据方面的几项最新经验，旨在启发、促进和改进目前正在规划的几项研究的设计，特别是在发展中国家。会议将强调发展中国家老龄化的独特之处，以及高收入国家老龄化的共同之处。因此，它将确定严格研究这类过程所需的信息类型，以及鉴于老化过程的独特性和共性，似乎最适合的工具和方案。这次会议将有助于确定什么是研究世界不同地区老龄化过程的几个维度的最佳研究设计。它将首次将研究类似问题、但在不同人口、社会、经济、政治和文化背景下工作的调查人员聚集在一起。会议可能有助于精简工作，学习彼此的经验，使正在进行和即将进行的数据收集工作更加统一，从而具有可比性。因此，这次会议不仅与公共卫生政策设计高度相关，而且与劳动力、收入分配和养老金制度相关的政策也高度相关。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This application requests support for one year to conduct one scientific meeting on the general topic of aging in developing (middle- and low-income) countries. A unique feature of this meeting is that it will bring together scholars from a variety of countries across the globe, including Asia, Latin America, and Africa. Scholars from developed countries will be included to foster collaborations across researchers from developed/developing countries, to share experiences in data collection in disparate settings, to discuss similarities and dissimilarities of the aging processes in both regions of the world, and to encourage and offer guidelines for conducting systematic comparative research. This conference is timely since it will take advantage of several very recent experiences in data collection on elderly people in developing and developed countries and is designed to enlighten, facilitate, and improve the design of several studies that are currently being planned, particularly in developing countries. The meeting will highlight what is unique about aging in developing countries and what is shared with aging in higher income countries. Accordingly, it will identify the type of information required to rigorously study such processes as well as the instruments and protocols that appear most suitable given the uniqueness and commonalities of aging processes. This meeting will help to identify what are the optimal study designs for studying several dimensions of the aging processes in different parts of the world. For the first time it will bring together investigators working on similar problems but on different demographic, social, economic, political and cultural contexts. The meeting may help to streamline efforts, to learn form each other's experiences, to make more uniform and hence comparable the data collection efforts, ongoing and forthcoming. As a consequence, this meeting is highly relevant for policy design not just for public health but also for policies related to labor force, income distribution, and pensions systems.