The Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), is a research infrastructure for studying the effects of health, social, economic and environmental policies over the life-course. The key value of SHARE lies in its strict cross-national comparability which permits unbiased cross-national comparisons of living conditions of the European population aged 50 and over in all EU countries, Switzerland and Israel. The main objective of SHARE is to provide excellent data for researchers worldwide through a combination of (a) European coverage, (b) transdisciplinarity and (c) population-representative panel design with strict cross-national comparability through ex-ante harmonisation.
The Achilles heel of SHARE, very much like the European Union itself, lies in the centrifugal forces of the member states with their different policies, priorities and abilities to pay. These centrifugal forces have increased with the number of countries and endanger the cohesion of SHARE as a pan-European infrastructure, especially our ability to harmonise the scientific content and the survey methods across SHARE’s member countries. SHARE’s strategy to counter these centrifugal forces has been, from its very beginning, to establish a strong central coordination, which is financially independent.
The overarching aim of this project is therefore to strengthen the centralised approach of SHARE in order to combine scientific excellence with cohesion across all 28 SHARE member countries. To reach this aim, several objectives are set in SHARE Waves 8, 9, and 10:
• Supporting the supranational innovation and development tasks to be executed by the Area Coordinators (scientific content)
• Supporting the survey designers (fieldwork methods and electronic tools)
• Funding training as it is instrumental for internal cohesion, especially in the scientifically less developed Member States and their participating SMEs
• Due to COVID-19, adaptation and revision of scientific content, electronic tools, interview mode, and training procedures, plus implementation of the first SHARE Corona Survey including data release