Name: Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe – participation of the Czech Republic
Institution: Economics Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences
Coordinator: Radim Boháček, Ph.D.; radim.bohacek@cerge-ei.cz
Website
SHARE-CZ is the Czech national node of the SHARE-ERIC (Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe) European distributed research infrastructure, the largest research infrastructure in social sciences in the EU. It is a multidisciplinary, international and longitudinal database of microdata on health, socio-economic status, social and family networks and other issues collected from more than 120,000 individuals aged 50+ from 27 European countries and Israel. The result is a free and unique data collection that provides information about the state, history and the future of both Czech and European society. SHARE allows researchers and state administrations to understand the consequences of demographic changes and formulate optimal policies for public finances, the labour market, health care and pension systems. Since 2004, the goal of the project has been to create a questionnaire for 5,000 respondents aged 50+ and their partners in each country, collect data on the same individuals every 2 years, and store the collected data in a user friendly, free and open access database. SHARE-ERIC also provides publications on the methodology and the data as well as organizes international conferences, workshops, user conferences and summer schools. In the Czech Republic, the project offers Czech researchers the possibility to place their own questions into an additional paper questionnaire. The future development of SHARE-CZ includes the collection of biomarkers, a link to administrative data, new questionnaire modules (time use, cognitive
skills, social networks), a user-friendly and easy SHARE database for students, new modes of interviewing between the main waves of data collection, the evaluation and development of measures of poverty, physical and mental health, and a pension claim database.SHARE-ERIC cooperates with other European research consortia such as SERISS (Synergies for Europe’s Research Infrastructures in the Social Sciences), CESSDA ERIC (Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives), EVS (European Values Study), ESS ERIC (European Social Survey), CLARIN ERIC (Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure), and DARIAH ERIC (Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities). SHARE-ERIC is coordinated with world leading research projects on ageing in the United States, England, and China and with the European Commission requirements for maintaining the highest possible quality of research, methodology and innovative technologies of data collection and their dissemination.
