Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe ERIC

European Research Infrastructure Consortium

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 of European citizens and beyond. From 2004 until today, 530,000 in-depth interviews with 140,000 people aged 50 or older from 28 european countries and Israel have been conducted. Thus, SHARE is the largest pan-European social science panel study providing internationally comparable longitudinal micro data which allow insights in the fields of public health and socio-economic living conditions of European individuals.

SHARE was created in response to a communication by the European Commission (2000) to the Council and the European Parliament, which identified population ageing and its social and economic challenges to growth and prosperity to be among the most pressing challenges of the 21st century in Europe. SHARE has also become one of the most prestigious social science infrastructures and was in 2011 the first to be appointed a European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC) by the European Council.

Sweden has since the onset of SHARE in 2002 participated in all the waves of data collection and is, through the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet), member of the SHARE-ERIC since 2014. SHARE is a key asset for ageing research in Europe and lays the foundations for empirical research through many disciplines, including epidemiology, gerontology, biology, medicine, psychology, public health, health policy, demography, economics, sociology, and statistics.

The overarching objective of SHARE is to better understand the interactions between bio-medical factors, the socio-economic environment and policy interventions in the ageing European populations. SHARE aims to achieve this objective by providing a research infrastructure for fundamental science as well as a tool for policy evaluation and design.