Establishment of a Danish SHARE data infrastructure
Name of applicant
Jørgen Trankjær Lauridsen
Institution
University of Southern Denmark
Amount
DKK 5,000,000
Year
2018
Type of grant
Research Infrastructure
What?
Ageing is one of the major challenges of the 21st century. This ageing society presents challenges in health, employment and social care that need to be resolved by policy actions as well as research. In the coming years, the Danish part of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement (SHARE-DK) will gather micro-data among Danish elderly (50+) about their ageing, health, socio-economic status, family and social networks. SHARE-DK is part of a longitudinal survey in 27 European countries and Israel. So far, 7 waves of data have been collected from more than 120.000 individuals in a joint European research data base (SHARE). This research infrastructure is freely available for research into ageing. The Carlsberg foundation grant secures that the coming wave 8 can be collected in Denmark.
Why?
Longitudinal interview data, which includes subjective and objective data on representative Danes, in combination with register data, provides unique opportunities for analyses and evidence based knowledge on relevant cause-response mechanisms, not the least when it comes to the question why we age and retire differently. SHARE data and research based on these can thus contribute to implementation of new policy initiatives addressing challenges following an ageing Denmark and Europe. Only few other countries can do this: research based on REGLINK-SHAREDK is thus internationally acknowledged. Various research environments in Denmark use SHARE data and continue having access to the data. They emphasize the unique opportunities, given the longitudinal and cross-national nature of data.
How?
The data infrastructure SHARE-DK is maintained by a daily team at the Department of Business and Economics (DBE) at SDU. The team consists of Country Team Leader (prof. Jørgen T. Lauridsen) and Country Team Operator (Astrid Roll Vitved). Their main task is to lead collection of data from the Danish respondents, which is conducted by Statistics Denmark (DST Survey). Together with data from all 28 countries, data will be freely available from a European homepage. Furthermore, Danish data will be merged with register data and made available for Danish researchers via Statistics Denmark. Finally, the daily team will initiate and stimulate projects based on data in Danish research environments. A cornerstone for this will be a biannual workshop for Danish SHARE users, next time in Fall 2019.