Martina Brandt (Author): Ageing in a global perspective - Research potentials of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe and international co-operations

This presentation shall introduce the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) and its potentials for multidisciplinary comparative research on ageing and the life course. SHARE is coordinated at the Munich Center for the Economics of Aging (MEA), Max-Planck Institute for Social Law and Social Policy. It is a multidisciplinary cross-national panel survey designed to inform evidence based policies. The first two waves – collected in 2004-05 and 2006-07, respectively – provide comprehensive data on the current economic, health, and social and family networks of more than 45,000 individuals aged 50 and over in 14 European countries (including Israel). The project’s third wave – SHARELIFE – has collected retrospective information on the life-histories including family, work and employment histories of these individuals in 2008-09. The fourth panel wave collected in 2010-11 includes 80,000 respondents from 19 European countries and added comprehensive information on social networks. SHARE and its sister surveys thus provide information on all key aspects of individual and population ageing in the “natural laboratory” of different cultures, policies and histories worldwide. We will present multidisciplinary findings on health, socio-economics and social networks across the life course to demonstrate the value of SHARE