We would hereby like to ask you for active participation in the SHARE project.  The paper-and-pencil questionnaire (dropoff) is completed by respondents (or their representatives) after the completion of the main CAPI questionnaire, and can include up to 20 questions.  The questions must be well and clearly formulated; they should not discourage the respondents from answering them and must also be intelligible due to the respondent’s age.  They also cannot repeat questions from the main questionnaire. The questions suggested by you must be approved by the project coordinator, prof. Borsch-Supan of the Max Planck Institute in Munich. The dropoff will then be tested in spring in a pilot survey and in June in a pre-test.  After each of these test phases, it will be possible and necessary to adapt the dropoff.  Naturally,  the data from the dropoff will be linked to the respondents’ longitudinal data, making it possible to relate them to answers to other questions. 

If you are interested in inserting your questions in the dropoff of the SHARE project, please write to the email provided below or get in touch over the phone.  Please study also the questionnaires from the previous waves to prevent duplicating the existing questions.   You will find references to questionnaires from the previous waves at the top of this page. They include Introductory questionnaires (Coverscreen), main questionnaires  (Questionnaire), questionnaires in the case of the respondent’s death (Exit) and dropoffs.  Please view the previous drop-offs downloadable from this site. We also recommend that you complete the registration for work with the SHARE project data on the website www.share-project.org, download its data free of charge and find out by its processing what is contained in the data and what is not.  On this website, complete documentation for the project can also be found, including the publication of results and detailed methodological and documentation materials.

We expect there to be more interested parties and each will be allocated space for several questions, not the whole dropoff. The questions can come from all disciplines (sociology, psychology, economics, etc., not just geriatrics).  Questions that are particularly welcome are those related to important problems in the Czech Republic, which would subsequently be used in scientific works,  dissertations,  teaching or formulation of fact-based government measures and laws. The whole dropoff and its processing will be primarily financed from the SHARE funds with the support of the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport. The data collection will be performed by the ScaC agency. It is strictly prohibited to use the dropoff questions in any relation to commercial or commercially funded research. We provide this open-access free service especially for students and starting researchers for whom it would be very difficult to collect their own data.

Before each wave we organize a meeting where the individual ideas and questions would be discussed, coordinated and prepared in a working form in which they could the be sent to the coordinator for preliminary approval.   The final form of the questions must be prepared for the final field rehearsal before the data collection.

We look forward to future cooperation. Please forward this document to your colleagues or students who might be interested in the SHARE project.

Radim Bohacek
SHARE-CZ country team coordinator
email: radim.bohacek@gmail.com