Health and Retirement Study

Last updated

The Health and Retirement Study (HRS) [1] is a longitudinal survey of a representative sample of Americans over age 50 conducted by the Survey Research Center (SRC) at the Institute for Social Research (ISR) at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and supported by the National Institute on Aging (NIA). The study interviews approximately 20,000 respondents every two years on subjects like health care, housing, assets, [2] pensions, [3] employment and disability. The study is managed through a cooperative agreement (NIA U01AG009740) between the NIA, which provides primary funding, and the ISR, which administers and conducts the survey. Beginning in 2012, HRS began adding genetic information from consenting participants to its database. [4] The economic measures captured by the data in the HRS are regarded as being of very high quality. [5]

Contents

Purpose

The HRS is designed to inform the national retirement discussion as the population ages. The inspiration for the HRS emerged in the mid-1980s, when scientists at NIA and elsewhere recognized the need for a new national survey of America’s expanding older population. By that time, it had become clear that the mainstay of retirement research, the Retirement History Study (RHS), conducted from 1969 to 1979, was no longer adequately addressing contemporary retirement issues. For example, the RHS sample underrepresented women, Blacks, and Hispanics who, by the mid-1980s were a growing part of the labor force. The RHS also did not ask about health or physical or mental function, all of which can affect the decision and ability to retire. Moreover, research on the retirement process was fragmented, with economists, sociologists, psychologists, epidemiologists, demographers, and biomedical researchers proposing and conducting studies within their own "silos," often without regard to the relevant research activities of other disciplines. [6]

Determining that a new approach was needed, an Ad Hoc Advisory Panel was convened by the National Institute on Aging. In early 1988 the panel recommended the initiation of a new, long-term study to examine the ways in which older adults’ changing health interacts with social, economic, and psychological factors and retirement decisions. Government experts and academic researchers from diverse disciplines were recruited to collaboratively create and design the study. Ultimately, relevant executive agencies and the United States Congress recognized the value of this major social science investment, and the HRS was established.

Administrative Information

Many individuals and institutions have contributed to the planning, design, development, and ongoing administration of the study. This includes the study’s leadership at the Institute for Social Research, specifically the first HRS Director, F. Thomas Juster, who led the effort to initiate the HRS, [7] Robert J. Willis, the Director from 1995 to 2007, and David R. Weir, the current Director. HRS relies on the contributions of the HRS co-investigators, a multidisciplinary group of leading academic researchers at the University of Michigan and other institutions nationwide, a steering committee and working groups, which have provided critical advice about the study’s design and monitored its progress, and the NIA-HRS Data Monitoring Committee, an advisory group of independent members of the academic research community and representatives of agencies interested in the study.

In addition, the Social Security Administration has provided technical advice and substantial support for the study. Over the HRS’s history, other important contributors have included the United States Department of Labor’s Pension and Welfare Benefits Administration, the United States Department of Health and Human Services Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, and the State of Florida.

The HRS has a number of sister studies in other countries. In recent years, the HRS has been extended to several Asian countries, including Korea (the Korean Longitudinal Study of Aging or KLoSA), Japan (the Japanese Study of Aging and Retirement or JSTAR), China (the Chinese Health and Retirement Survey or CHARLS), India (The Longitudinal Aging Study in India or LASI) and New Zealand (Health, Work and Retirement Study). Population aging is very rapid in Asia and India and China alone will have more than one billion people over age 60 during this century. CHARLS is headed by a team at the Chinese Center for Economic Research (CCER) at Peking University under the direction of Professor Zhao Yaohui. LASI is jointly headed by a team from Harvard University under the direction of Professor David Bloom and the International Institute of Population Studies (IIPS) in Mumbai India. Both CHARLS and LASI were awarded peer review grants to conduct pilot studies by the National Institute of Aging in the United States. Other studies include:

The Gateway to Global Aging Data, a resource that facilitates the use and harmonization of the different datasets of HRS and sister studies in other countries has been developed with support of the National Institute on Aging, National Institutes of Health (RC2 AG036619-01 and R01 AG030153)

Notes

  1. ↑ National Institute on Aging, Growing Older in America: The Health and Retirement Study Archived 2007-06-23 at the Wayback Machine , Washington, DC, National Institutes of Health, 2007.
  2. ↑ Hurd, M.D., Juster F.T. and Smith J.P. Enhancing the Quality of Data on Income: Recent Innovations from the HRS. In: Journal of Human Resources, 38 (3), Summer 2003, pp. 758-772.
  3. ↑ Gustman, A. L., Mitchell, O. S., Samwick, A. A., and Steinmeier, T. L. Evaluating Pension Entitlements. In: Forecasting Retirement Needs and Retirement Wealth, eds. Mitchell, O., Hammond, B., and Rappaport, A. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. pp. 309-326.
  4. ↑ "NIA adds genetic data to Health and Retirement Study", Washington, DC, National Institutes of Health, 2012.
  5. ↑ French, E., Jones, J. & McCauley, J. (2017). The Accuracy of Economic Measurement in the Health and Retirement Study. Forum for Health Economics and Policy, 0(0), pp. -. Available at doi:10.1515/fhep-2017-0001
  6. ↑ Rodgers, W.L. and Herzog, A.R. Collecting data about the oldest old: Problems and procedures. In: The Oldest Old, eds., Richard M. Suzman, David P. Willis, and Kenneth G. Manton. New York: Oxford University Press. 1992. pp. 135-156
  7. ↑ Wealth, Work, and Health: Innovations in Measurement in the Social Sciences: Essays in honor of F. Thomas Juster, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1999.

Related Research Articles

Retirement is the withdrawal from one's position or occupation or from one's active working life. A person may also semi-retire by reducing work hours or workload.

The National Longitudinal Surveys (NLS) are a set of surveys sponsored by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) of the U.S. Department of Labor. These surveys have gathered information at multiple points in time on the labor market experiences and other significant life events of several groups of men and women. Each of the NLS samples consists of several thousand individuals, many of whom have been surveyed over several decades.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan</span> Demographic center

The Michigan Population Studies Center is a demography center in the United States, with an extensive record in both domestic and international population research and training.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe</span>

The Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) is a multidisciplinary and cross-national panel database of micro data on health, socio-economic status and social and family networks. In seven survey waves to date, SHARE has conducted approximately 380,000 interviews with about 140,000 individuals aged 50 and over. The survey covers 28 European countries and Israel.

The English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA) is a longitudinal study that collects multidisciplinary data from a representative sample of the English population aged 50 and older to look at all aspects of aging in England.

The Study on global AGEing and adult health (SAGE) is run by the World Health Organization. An objective for SAGE is to compile comprehensive longitudinal data on the health and well-being of adult populations and the ageing process across different countries, through primary data collection, secondary data analysis and cross-study collaborations.

Alan Barrett is the Director of the Economic and Social Research Institute. He joined the ESRI in 1994 and took up the position of Director in July 2015. His research is primarily focused on labour economics and population economics and is widely published. He worked as Project Director of the Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing (TILDA) at Trinity College Dublin and has served as a member of the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council. He is a Research Fellow with the Institute for the Study of Labor in Bonn, Germany and an Honorary Fellow of the Society of Actuaries in Ireland. He is also a member of the National Expert Advisory Council on Climate Change.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">China Family Panel Studies</span> Chinese social surveys

China Family Panel Studies is a nationally representative, biennial longitudinal general social survey project designed to document changes in Chinese society, economy, population, education, and health. The CFPS was launched in 2010 by the Institute of Social Science Survey (ISSS) of Peking University, China. The data were collected at the individual, family, and community levels and are targeted for use in academic research and public policy analysis. CFPS focuses on the economic and non-economic well-being of the Chinese people, and covers topics such as economic activities, educational attainment, family relationships and dynamics, migration, and physical and mental health. The themes cover social, economic, education, health and so forth.

SHARE-Israel is the Israeli component of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe, a multidisciplinary and cross-national panel database of micro data on health, socio-economic status as well as social and family networks of individuals aged 50 or over.

The Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) is a longitudinal panel survey of American families, conducted by the Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan.

The China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS) is a longitudinal survey being conducted by the China Center for Economic Research at Peking University with Professor Yaohui Zhao of Peking University serving as Principal Investigator and Professors John Strauss of the University of Southern California and Albert Park of HKUST Institute for Emerging Market Studies serving as co-Principal Investigators.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sarah Harper</span> British gerontologist

Sarah Harper FRAI CBE is a British gerontologist, who established Oxford's Institute of Population Ageing, and became the University of Oxford's first Professor of Gerontology. She served on the Prime Minister's Council for Science and Technology between 2014 and 2017 and in 2017 was appointed Director of the Royal Institution of Great Britain. Sarah was appointed a CBE in 2018 for services to the Science of Demography.

The Millennium Cohort Study (MCS) is a longitudinal survey conducted by the Centre for Longitudinal Studies (CLS) at the University of London, following the lives of a sample of about 18,818 babies born in the UK in the year 2000–2001.

The Swiss Centre of Expertise in the Social Sciences (FORS) is a national research infrastructure, created in 2008. FORS is financed by the Swiss State Secretariat for Education and Research, the Swiss National Science Foundation, and the University of Lausanne. Its purpose is to provide services to the social science research community, to conduct research, and to publish and disseminate research findings.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">University of Michigan Institute for Social Research</span>

The University of Michigan Institute for Social Research (ISR) is the largest academic social research and survey organization in the world, established in 1949. ISR includes more than 300 scientists from a variety of academic disciplines – including political science, psychology, sociology, economics, demography, history, anthropology, and statistics. The institute is a unit that houses five separate but interdependent centers which conduct research and maintain data archives. In 2021, Kathleen Cagney became the first woman in its history to be named Director of the institute.

The Max Planck Institute for Social Law and Social Policy is a research facility located in Maxvorstadt, Munich, Bavaria, Germany.

The Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing (TILDA) is a nationally representative longitudinal study of the population of Ireland aged 50 and above. TILDA aims to understand the health, social and financial circumstances of the older Irish population and how these factors interact. The study is led by Trinity College Dublin (TCD) in collaboration with a majority of the other principal academic institutions in Ireland. A wide range of experts from many disciplines have been involved from the outset in the development and execution of this study.

The Australian Longitudinal Study on Women's Health (ALSWH), also known as Women's Health Australia, is an ongoing population-based survey examining the health of over 50,000 Australian women. The study is funded by the Australian Government Department of Health and is a collaborative endeavour conducted by staff and investigators at The University of Newcastle and The University of Queensland. The current directors are Professor Gita Mishra (The University of Queensland) and Professor Deborah Loxton (The University of Newcastle).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Axel Börsch-Supan</span> German mathematician and economist

Axel Börsch-Supan is a German researcher, economist and director of the Munich Center for the Economics of Aging (MEA) at the Max Planck Institute for Social Law and Social Policy in Munich, Germany. He is Professor of Economics and Chair for the Economics of Aging at the Technical University of Munich. Additionally, he is Managing Director of SHARE-ERIC. An important field of his empirical research focuses on socio-political issues that are associated with economic aspects of demographic change and the aging of the population.

James Nazroo, PhD, MBBS FBA FaCSS, is Professor of Sociology at the University of Manchester. He is the founding and Deputy Director of the ESRC Centre of Dynamics of Ethnicity (CoDE), co-Principal Investigator (PI) of the Synergi Collaborative Centre, which is investigating ethnic inequalities in severe mental illness, and founding and co-Director of the Manchester Institute for Collaborative Research on Ageing (MICRA). Issues of inequality, social justice and underlying processes of stratification have been the primary focus of his research activities, centring on ethnicity/race, ageing, gender, and the interrelationships between these. Central to his work on ethnicity/race has been developing an understanding of the links between ethnicity, racism, class and inequality. This work has covered a variety of elements of social disadvantage, how these relate to racialised identities and processes of racism, and how these patterns have changed over time. He has also explored the role of access to and quality of health services, including a critical examination of mental health services. His research on ageing has been concerned to understand the patterns and determinants of social and health inequalities in ageing populations. He has conducted studies on quality of life for older people among different ethnic groups in the UK, on inequalities in health at older ages, and on routes into retirement and the impact of retirement on health and well-being. He was PI of the fRaill programme, an interdisciplinary study of inequalities in later life, and is co-PI of the English Longitudinal Study of Aging (ELSA) which is a multi-disciplinary panel study of those aged 50 and older.

References

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.