About SHARE in the Czech Republic


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 more than 140,000 individuals coming from 28 European countries and Israel aged 50+ and their partners. 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, labour 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. In 2019 and 2020 data of the 8th wave of the SHARE project in the Czech Republic have been collected, together with a special Covid19 CATI interview in spring and fall 2020.

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 organisations.

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 organisations.  In spring 2021, the SHARE-ERIC research infrastructure had over 12,000 registered individual users and more than 3,100 scientific publications. 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.


Radim Boháček, PhD
Country team leader in the Czech Republic
Economics Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences