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European Journal of Ageing
Published in: European Journal of Ageing 4/2005

01-12-2005 | Original Investigation

A new comprehensive and international view on ageing: introducing the ‘Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe’

Authors: Axel Börsch-Supan, Karsten Hank, Hendrik Jürges

Published in: European Journal of Ageing | Issue 4/2005

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Abstract

This paper introduces the ‘Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe’ (SHARE) to researchers on ageing. SHARE provides an infrastructure to help researchers better understand the individual and population ageing process: where we are, where we are heading to, and how we can influence the quality of life as we age, both as individuals and as societies. The baseline wave in 2004 provides data on the life circumstances of some 27,000 persons aged 50 and over in 11 European countries, ranging from Scandinavia across Western and Central Europe to the Mediterranean. SHARE has made great efforts to deliver truly comparable data, so we can reliably study how differences in cultures, living conditions and policy approaches shape the life of Europeans just before and after retirement. The paper first describes the SHARE data. In order to demonstrate its value, it then presents highlights from the three main research areas covered by SHARE, namely economics, sociology, and health.
Footnotes
1
Unfortunately, we cannot distinguish different kinds of voluntary work (e.g. coaching at a sports club, distributing food or clothes, serving in committees or boards) nor do we know how many hours a respondent has volunteered.
 
2
To ensure comparability with a large number of other surveys, SHARE contains two different versions of the self-reported health question. Both are 5-point scales. One ranges from ‘excellent’ to ‘poor’ (used, e.g. in the US Health and Retirement Survey), the other ranges from ‘very good’ to ‘very poor’ (used, e.g. by WHO in numerous studies). To ease the exposition, we concentrate on the former version.
 
3
The final release of the SHARE data will offer a second, complementary way to purge our data from cross-country reporting bias, so-called anchoring vignettes.
 
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Metadata
Title
A new comprehensive and international view on ageing: introducing the ‘Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe’
Authors
Axel Börsch-Supan
Karsten Hank
Hendrik Jürges
Publication date
01-12-2005
Publisher
Springer-Verlag
Published in
European Journal of Ageing / Issue 4/2005
Print ISSN: 1613-9372
Electronic ISSN: 1613-9380
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10433-005-0014-9

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