Abstract
Health and employment are key determinants of our well-being. They are major objectives of the European welfare state, e.g. of the Lisbon agenda. Yet, health and employment vary tremendously across Europe. This variation is particularly large at older ages when the sum of influences over the entire life course expresses itself.
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Acknowledgements
Thanks belong first and foremost to the participants of this study. None of the work presented here and in the future would have been possible without their support, time, and patience. It is their answers which allow us to sketch solutions to some of the most daunting problems of ageing societies. The editors and researchers of this book are aware that the trust given by our respondents entails the responsibility to use the data with the utmost care and scrutiny.
Collecting these data has been possible through a sequence of contracts by the European Commission and the U.S. National Institute on Aging, as well as support by many of the member states.
The SHARE data collection has been primarily funded by the European Commission through the 5th framework programme (project QLK6-CT-2001-00360 in the thematic programme Quality of Life). Further support by the European Commission through the 6th framework programme (projects SHARE-I3, RII-CT-2006-062193, as an Integrated Infrastructure Initiative, COMPARE, CIT5-CT-2005-028857, as a project in Priority 7, Citizens and Governance in a Knowledge Based Society, and SHARE-LIFE (No 028812 CIT4)) and through the 7th framework programme (SHARE-PREP (No 211909) and SHARE-LEAP (No 227822)) is gratefully acknowledged. We thank, in alphabetical order, Giulia Amaducci, Kevin McCarthy, Hervé Pero, Ian Perry, Robert-Jan Smits, Dominik Sobczak and Maria Theofilatou in DG Research for their continuing support of SHARE. We are also grateful for the support by DG Employment, Social Affairs, and Equal Opportunities through Georg Fischer, Ruth Paserman, Fritz von Nordheim, and Jérôme Vignon, and by DG Economic and Financial Affairs through Declan Costello, Bartosz Pzrywara and Klaus Regling.
Substantial co-funding for add-ons such as the intensive training programme for SHARE interviewers came from the US National Institute on Ageing (U01 AG09740-13S2, P01 AG005842, P01 AG08291, P30 AG12815, R21 AG025169, Y1-AG-4553-01, IAG BSR06-11 and OGHA 04-064). We thank John Phillips and Richard Suzman for their enduring support and intellectual input.
Some SHARE countries had national co-funding which was important to carry out the study. Sweden was supported by the Swedish Social Insurance Agency and Spain acknowledges gratefully the support from Instituto Nacional de Estadistica and IMSERSO. Austria (through the Austrian Science Foundation, FWF) and Belgium (through the Belgian Science Policy Administration and the Flemish agency for Innovation by Science and Technology) were mainly nationally funded. Switzerland received additional funding from the University of Lausanne, the Département Universitaire de Médecine et Santé Communautaires (DUMSC) and HEC Lausanne (Faculté des Hautes Etudes Commerciales). Data collection for wave 1 was nationally funded in France through the Caisse Nationale d'Assurance Maladie, Caisse Nationale d'Assurance Vieillesse, Conseil d'Orientation des Retraites, Direction de la Recherche, des Etudes, de l'Evaluation et des Statistiques du ministère de la santé, Direction de l'Animation de la Recherche, des Etudes et des Statistiques du ministère du Travail, Caisse des Dépôts et Consignations, and Commissariat Général du Plan. INSEE (Institut National de la Statistique et des Etudes Economiques) co-founded all 3 waves.
SHARELIFE was a different type of survey than the previous two rounds of interviews, requiring new technologies to be developed and used. Programming and software development for the SHARELIFE survey was done by CentERdata at Tilburg. We want to thank Alerk Amin, Maarten Brouwer, Marcel Das, Maurice Martens, Corrie Vis, Bas Weerman, Erwin Werkers, and Arnaud Wijnant for their support, patience and time. Kirsten Alcser, Grant Benson, and Heidi Guyer at the Survey Research Center (SRC) of the University of Michigan Ann Arbor again provided the Train-the-Trainer programme for SHARELIFE, and invested tremendous amounts of time and work to develop the prototype of a quality profile for the data collection, which included visiting the sites of the national interviewer trainings in participating countries. Kate Cox, Elisabeth Hacker, and Carli Lessof from the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen) gave helpful input in designing the questionnaire and pointed out the retrospective specifics in the interview process. We always kept in close contact with the professional survey agencies – IFES (AT), PSBH, Univ. de Liège (BE), Link (CH), SC&C (CZ), Infas (DE), SFI Survey (DK), Demoscopia (ES), INSEE (FR), KAPA Research (GR), DOXA (IT), TNS NIPO (NL), TNS OBOP (PL), and Intervjubolaget (SE) – and thank their representatives for a fruitful cooperation. Especially the work of the more than 1,000 interviewers across Europe was essential to this project.
The innovations of SHARE rest on many shoulders. The combination of an interdisciplinary focus and a longitudinal approach has made the English Longitudinal Survey on Ageing (ELSA) and the US Health and Retirement Study (HRS) our main role models. Input into the concepts of retrospective questionnaires came from Robert Belli and David Blane. The life history questionnaire has been implemented first in the ELSA study, and without the help of people involved there (James Banks, Carli Lessof, Michael Marmot and James Nazroo), SHARELIFE could not have been created in such a short time. SHARELIFE has also greatly profited from detailed advice given by Michael Hurd, Jim Smith, David Weir and Bob Willis from the HRS as well as by the members of the SHARE scientific monitoring board: Orazio Attanasio, Lisa Berkman, Nicholas Christakis, Mick Couper, Michael Hurd, Daniel McFadden, Norbert Schwarz and Andrew Steptoe, chaired by Arie Kapteyn. Without their intellectual and practical advice, and their continuing encouragement and support, SHARE would not be where it is now.
Since SHARELIFE was an entirely newly designed questionnaire, the work of developing and constructing the questions was immense. We are very grateful to the contributions of the eight working groups involved in this process. Specifically, Agar Brugiavini, Lisa Calligaro, Enrica Croda, Giacomo Pasini, and Elisabetta Trevisan developed the module for financial incentives of pension systems. Johannes Siegrist and Morten Wahrendorf provided input for the module on quality of work and retirement. The development of questions for the part of disability insurance and labour force participation of older workers was responsibility of Hendrik Jürges, whereas the health and retirement section was constructed by Johan Mackenbach and Mauricio Avendano. Preventive care, health services utilisation, and retirement fell into the realm of Brigitte Santos-Eggimann and Sarah Cornaz, and Karsten Hank provided his input for the gender, family, and retirement section. Wealth and retirement questions were designed by Guglielmo Weber and Omar Paccagnella, and finally, questions on health risk, health insurance, and saving for retirement were integrated by Tullio Japelli and Dimitri Christelis.
A large enterprise with 150 researchers in 13 countries entails also a large amount of day-to-day work, which is easily understated. We would like to thank Kathrin Axt, Maria Dauer, Marie-Louise Kemperman, Tatjana Schäffner, and Eva Schneider at the MEA in Mannheim for their administrative support throughout various phases of the project. Annelies Blom, Martina Brandt, Karsten Hank, Hendrik Jürges, Dörte Naumann, and Mathis Schröder provided the backbone work in coordinating, developing, and organizing the SHARELIFE project. Preparing the data files for the fieldwork, monitoring the survey agencies, testing the data for errors and consistency are all tasks which are essential to this project. A small glimpse into the details and efforts of data preparation is provided in the methodology volume to this project (Schröder 2010). The authors and editors are grateful to Christian Hunkler, Thorsten Kneip, Julie Korbmacher, Barbara Schaan, Stephanie Stuck, and Sabrina Zuber for data cleaning and monitoring services at the MEA in Mannheim, and Guiseppe de Luca and Dimitri Christelis for weight calculations and imputations in Padua, Salerno and Venice. Finally, Theresa Mutter at the MEA provided excellent assistance in proof-reading the finalized versions of these papers.
Last but by no means least, the country teams are the flesh to the body of SHARE and provided invaluable support: Rudolf Winter-Ebmer, Nicole Halmdienst, Michael Radhuber and Mario Schnalzenberger (Austria); Karel van den Bosch, Sergio Perelman, Claire Maréchal, Laurant Nisen, Jerome Schoenemaeckers, Greet Sleurs and Aaron van den Heede (Belgium); Radim Bohacek, Michal Kejak and Jan Kroupa (Czech Republic); Karen Andersen Ranberg, Henriette Engberg, and Mikael Thingaard (Denmark); Anne Laferrère, Nicolas Briant, Pascal Godefroy, Marie-Camille Lenormand and Nicolas Sirven (France); Axel Börsch-Supan and Karsten Hank (Germany); Antigone Lyberiaki, Platon Tinios, Thomas Georgiadis and George Papadoudis (Greece); Guglielmo Weber, Danilo Cavapozzi, Loretti Dobrescu, Christelle Garrouste and Omar Paccagnella (Italy); Frank van der Duyn Shouten, Arthur van Soest, Manon de Groot, Adriaan Kalwij and Irina Suanet (Netherlands); Michał Myck, Malgorzata Kalbardczyk and Anna Nicinska (Poland); Pedro Mira and Laura Crespo (Spain); Kristian Bolin and Thomas Eriksson (Sweden); Alberto Holly, Karine Moschetti, Pascal Paschoud and Boris Wernli (Switzerland).
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Börsch-Supan, A., Schröder, M. (2011). Employment and Health at 50+: An Introduction to a Life History Approach to European Welfare State Interventions. In: Börsch-Supan, A., Brandt, M., Hank, K., Schröder, M. (eds) The Individual and the Welfare State. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-17472-8_1
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