Organizing and Analyzing Data from the SHARE Study with an Application to Age and Sex Differences in Depressive Symptoms.

Lara Lusa,Marianne Huebner

doi:10.3390/ijerph18189684

Abstract

The SHARE study contains health, lifestyle, and socioeconomic data from individuals ages 50 and older in European countries collected over several waves. Leveraging these data for research purposes can be daunting due to the complex structure of the longitudinal design. The two aims of our study are (1) to develop a framework and R code for data management of the SHARE data to prepare for data analysis, and (2) to demonstrate how to apply the framework to a specific research question, where the aim is to model the presence of clinically significant depression assessed by the 12-item Europe depression scale. The result is a framework that substantially reduces the time to initiate research studies using SHARE data, facilitating the data extraction, data preparation and initial data analysis, with reproducible R code. Further, we illustrate the extensive work required to prepare an analysis-ready data set to ensure the validity of the modeling results. This underlines the importance of carefully considering and recording data management decisions that have to be built into the research process. The results about sex differences in the probability of depression are consistent with previous literature. Our findings about age-associated changes can be opportunities for adequate treatment interventions.

Highlights

The Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) is a multinational panel data survey, collecting data on medical, economic and social characteristics of about140,000 unique participants after age 50, from 28 European countries and Israel [1]
We developed functions written in open source statistical software R [6] for data download, data pre-processing, and data management for SHARE data to facilitate the selection of variables within modules and waves, and their retrieval in R or text format
Data are stored in ZIP files and can be categorized in three types: (i) Data from specific waves; (ii) data across waves (where folder names start with sharewX and include longitudinal weights, coverscreen (CV_R) data, job episodes panel, linkage data); (iii) a simplified data set for teaching purposes, easySHARE

Summary

Introduction

The Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) is a multinational panel data survey, collecting data on medical, economic and social characteristics of about. 140,000 unique participants after age 50, from 28 European countries and Israel [1]. The intent is to collect information on health and socio-economic factors for an aging population, using a longitudinal study design ’to allow insights in the fields of public health and socioeconomic living conditions of European individuals’ The data are harmonized across countries as well as with other studies in aging such as the U.S Study of Health and Retirement (HRS) [2] and the English. Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA) [3] and is an extraordinary resource. The dataset derived from the SHARE study is publicly available for scientific purposes after registration, in Stata [4]

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