SHARE in the Czech Republic
Welcome to the official website of the SHARE project in the Czech Republic. SHARE is a multi-disciplinary international time-collection database of microdata on health, socioeconomic status and social and family networks of approximately 150,000 individuals (over 530,000 interviews) aged 50+ from all EU countries, Switzerland and Israel.
All information on the project can be found at its official website at https://share-eric.eu/.
Česká verze těchto stránek je také v anglickém jazyce (klikněte na ikonu EN na horní liště).
This English language website has its mirror website in Czech language (click on CZ on top bar).
The data collection is carried out by the SCaC agency. More information on the project can be found on their website.
About the SHARE Project
The Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE-ERIC) 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. SHARE is the largest pan-European social science panel study providing internationally comparable longitudinal micro data which allows insights in the fields of public health and socio-economic living conditions of European individuals, both for scientists and policy makers.
SHARE has global impact since it not only covers all EU member countries in a strictly harmonized way but additionally is embedded in a network of sister studies all over the world, from the Americas to Eastern Asia. SHARE has become a major pillar of the European Research Area, an ESFRI project since 2006, the first ever European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC) established in 2011, and an ESFRI landmark since 2016. SHARE is centrally coordinated at the SHARE Berlin Institute.
SHARE’s Global Scientific Impact
SHARE has set new standards in research and scientific data collection with 28 country teams and within an international network.
Over the years, SHARE built an operative infrastructure with research teams in 27 European countries and Israel. All continental member states of the European Union participate in SHARE.
The survey’s large-scale design has encouraged the SHARE team to come up with constant conceptual improvements, bearing plenty innovations in the fields of methodology. Furthermore, SHARE data enabled researchers all over the world to practice in-depth and topical research in a variety of research fields, from biology to demography, economics, epidemiology, gerontology, medicine, psychology, public health, sociology, and more.
SHARE follows these five principles:
- SHARE should be designed by researchers for researchers. Research excellence is paramount to all other considerations, and the close integration of survey design and substantive research is essential.
- SHARE is intended to be supranational, since the SHARE data must reflect cross-country differences in welfare policies in order to identify their impacts. This requires strict ex-ante harmonization of the survey instrument and survey methods across time and countries to avoid artefacts when comparing the impact of different welfare systems.
- SHARE should be multidisciplinary and provide research capacity to study the interactions between biomedical factors on the one hand and socio-economic factors on the other.
- SHARE should be longitudinal, i. e. the same respondents should be followed multiple times over the years to understand their individual ageing processes and how they adapt to changing environments over time. In an era characterized by accelerated technological advances and medical innovations, ongoing changes in healthcare and social policies, as well as major global crises such as the current pandemic and climate change are occurring in quick succession. In order to observe these historical processes and their impact on Europe and its citizens, SHARE is essential.
- In order to maintain intertemporal, international and intercultural comparability, SHARE has placed an emphasis on objective data collection: in the health sector, SHARE uses performance measurements and accelerometers and collects blood samples; in the economic field, income and pension assets are validated by linking them to administrative data.
About the SHARE Project
SHARE-CZ is a Czech national node of the pan-European distributed research infrastructure SHARE-ERIC (Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe), which is a multidisciplinary and cross‑national longitudinal database of micro-data on health, socio-economic status, social and family networks and other issues collected from respondents 50+ and their partners in all EU countries, Switzerland, and Israel.
The result is a free and unique data collection that provides information about the state, history and the future of the Czech and European society. SHARE allows researchers and state administrations to understand the consequences of demographic changes and formulate optimal policies for public finances, labor market, health care or pension systems. Since 2004, SHARE is a longitudinal survey that is repeated every two years. The main goals are to create a main questionnaire for 5,000 respondents aged 50+ and their partners in each country, every two years collect data on the same individuals and store the collected data and its documentation in a user friendly, free and open access database accessible to all users.
SHARE combines three unique and innovative strengths. It is ex-ante harmonized across the countries, multi-disciplinary and longitudinal. SHARE also provides publications on the methodology and data and organizes every year international conferences, workshops, user conferences and summer schools at the central level of the SHARE ERIC coordinator and at each SHARE national node. In the Czech Republic, SHARE-CZ cooperates with the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs, Expert Commission on the Pension Reform of the Government of the Czech Republic and with more than 20 other universities and research organizations.
Future development
Researchers participating in the SHARE-CZ project are actively cooperating with the world leading research projects on population ageing such as HRS (Health and Retirement Study), ELSA (English Longitudinal Study of Ageing), RAND Center for the Study of Aging and with the international research community in order to maintain highest possible quality of research, comparability of data with other surveys, methodology and innovative technology of data collection and dissemination. Future development of SHARE-CZ includes the collection of biomarkers, linkage of data to official statistics, development of new modules (time use questionnaire, cognitive functions, life history), user friendly easySHARE database for students, national questionnaires developed by external researchers, new modes of interviewing between the main waves of data collection, evaluation and development of physical and mental health measures, a pension claim data base and European Poverty Module, among others.
Socio-economic impact
SHARE-CZ research infrastructure is a service for the international and Czech research community as well as to the whole society. SHARE-CZ promotes innovation and research through its freely accessible data used by other researchers at universities and other research organizations. The main impact of SHARE is the creation of a truly longitudinal and internationally comparable data collection, which allows researchers to analyse and understand interactions between the dramatically changing demographic development and policy responses in individual countries and the EU as a whole.
On these pages you will find all information about the project, data access, methodology, questionnaires, users and their publications, easySHARE data access for students and much more. We organize lectures for users and provide support in working with the data.
Radim Boháček, PhD
Country team leader in the Czech Republic
Economics Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences
Politických vězňů 7, 111 21 Praha 1
email: radim.bohacek@cerge-ei.cz