At the end of August, the Gateway team hosted our virtual Gateway to Global Aging Data Project Meeting on Zoom. Taking place over two days, we and our collaborators across the globe provided updates to current projects and had fruitful discussions on new innovations for the next project cycle.

To share some of our current progress and work with the larger research community, we have briefly summarized some of the presentations below. These presentations are divided into three subtopics:

1. Project Aims and Project Updates
2. Air Pollution
3. Harmonized Cognitive Assessment Protocol (HCAP)

Project Aims and Project Updates

The Gateway to Global Aging is a data and information platform developed to facilitate longitudinal and cross-country analyses on aging, especially those using the family of Health and Retirement Studies (HRS) around the world. As of October 2020, the Gateway has indexed metadata from over 20 surveys in 46 countries, enabling both cross-wave and cross-survey searches. It has created 29,213 key harmonized variables on demographics, health, financial and housing wealth, income, family structure, retirement, employment history, cognition, consumption, health care, and pension for cross-wave/cross-country analyses. We now have 6,197 registered users. Interested users can find more details on project scope, progress, and future plans in Dr. Jinkook Lee's presentation.

In addition to the core interview data, we have built the Harmonized data files for the End-of-life interview and the Life-History interview.

Dr. Jennifer Ailshire, Associate Professor of Gerontology at the University of Southern California, gave a walkthrough on end-of-life interview content, advantages and challenges of end-of-life data harmonization, and new opportunities for future work.

Dr. Morten Wahrendorf and Dr. Christian Deindl, both from the University of Düsseldorf, reviewed progress made on the harmonization of life-history data from SHARE and ELSA and highlighted the state sequence format, challenges to harmonization, and next steps.
 

Air Pollution

Our team has been working closely with Dr. Gavin Shaddick, from the University of Exeter, in bringing contextual data on air pollution into the Gateway. Dr. Shaddick presented on the estimation strategy used to measure exposures to air pollution: the Data Integration Model for Air Quality (DIMAQ) approach. Our vision is to link these air pollution estimates to the HRS International Network of Studies, using the geographic information.
 

Harmonized Cognitive Assessment Protocol (HCAP)

HCAP is an important new initiative, collecting high-quality data on late-life cognition and dementia. We, the Gateway to Global Aging Data team, are actively working to incorporate the newly available HCAP by completing the pre-statistical harmonization process. (If this topic sounds familiar, you’re correct! As part of our Gateway Blog Series, we compared the HCAP studies across the HRS international network of studies using our cross-study comparison table.

Dr. Emily Briceño, from the University of Michigan Medical School, and Dr. Miguel Arce Rentería, from the Columbia University Medical Center, shared progress from their work on the comparability of the HRS-HCAP and MHAS Mex-Cog.

Two Gateway collaborators, Dr. Erik Meijer & Dr. Alden Gross, have made further progress on statistical harmonization.

Dr. Erik Meijer, senior economist at the University of Southern California, discussed his work on imputations in the HCAP-family of studies, providing an explanation of the imputation strategy used.

Dr. Alden Gross, a neuroepidemiologist from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, described his efforts on statistical harmonization based on the item-response theory. His work on the LASI-DAD was briefly mentioned in a past blog post.

Interested in any of these topics? Access the presentation slides here on the Gateway to Global Aging website!