Scientific Impact of SHARE

Over the years, SHARE built an operative infrastructure with research teams in 27 European countries and Israel. All continental member states of the European Union participate in SHARE.

The survey’s large-scale design has encouraged the SHARE team to come up with constant conceptual improvements, bearing plenty innovations in the fields of methodology. Furthermore, SHARE data enabled researchers all over the world to practice in-depth and topical research in a variety of research fields, from biology to demography, economics, epidemiology, gerontology, medicine, psychology, public health, sociology, and more.

SHARE follows these five principles:

1. SHARE should be designed by researchers for researchers. Research excellence is paramount to all other considerations, and the close integration of survey design and substantive research is essential.
2. SHARE is intended to be supranational, since the SHARE data must reflect cross-country differences in welfare policies in order to identify their impacts. This requires strict ex-ante harmonization of the survey instrument and survey methods across time and countries to avoid artefacts when comparing the impact of different welfare systems. 
3. SHARE should be multidisciplinary and provide research capacity to study the interactions between biomedical factors on the one hand and socio-economic factors on the other. 
4. SHARE should be longitudinal, i. e. the same respondents should be followed multiple times over the years to understand their individual ageing processes and how they adapt to changing environments over time. In an era characterized by accelerated technological advances and medical innovations, ongoing changes in healthcare and social policies, as well as major global crises such as the current pandemic and climate change are occurring in quick succession. In order to observe these historical processes and their impact on Europe and its citizens, SHARE is essential.
5. In order to maintain intertemporal, international and intercultural comparability, SHARE has placed an emphasis on objective data collection: in the health sector, SHARE uses performance measurements and accelerometers and collects blood samples; in the economic field, income and pension assets are validated by linking them to administrative data.

SHARE´s Global Sister Surveys

• HRS - Health and Retirement Study
• ELSA - English Longitudinal Study of Ageing
• TILDA - The Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing
• CHARLS - Chinese Health and Retirement Survey
• ELSI-Brasil - Estudo Longitudinal de Saúde do Idoso
• JSTAR - The Japanese Study of Aging and Retirement
• KLoSA - The Korean Longitudinal Study of Aging
• LASI - The Longitudinal Aging Study in India
• MHAS - Mexican Health and Aging Study
• SAGE - Study on Global AGEing and Adult Health
• AL-SEHA - Longitudinal Study of Egyptian Healthy Aging
• HAALSI - Health and Aging in Africa: A Longitudinal Study of an INDEPTH Community in South Africa
• IFLS - Indonesian Family Life Survey
• CRELES - Costa Rican Longevity and Healthy Aging Study
• HAGIS - Healthy AGeing In Scotland
• NICOLA - Northern Ireland Cohort for the Longitudinal Study of Ageing
• MARS - Malaysia Ageing and Retirement Survey
• HART - Health, Aging, and Retirement in Thailand