Methodological Research

Non-response project

Respondent incentives, interviewer training, and survey participation

Survey participation has been declining in Germany and Europe over the past decades. This may harm the reliability of the collected data because the non-participation may not be random. As a consequence, results drawn from these data may be biased since the sample may not be representative of the actual target population.
The non-response project will target this issue from both ends. First, this project will investigate how participation in face-to-face interviews can be increased in Germany using The Survey of Health, Ageing, and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) as the backbone for this large scale experiment.  The non-response project will examine the effect of unconditional monetary incentives on the respondents’ willingness to participate and thus on the overall survey response rates. In addition, a group of interviewers will receive an additional day of interviewer training halfway through the field period to test the effectiveness of training on response rates. Second, a doorstep non-response study will be conducted to quantify the potential non-response bias.
The results from this project will enable researchers to more effectively choose between the use of respondent incentives and special interviewer training when conducting surveys. The long-term consequences of this particular project are thus important for planned and existing survey projects in countries, where the use of incentives and training has not been thoroughly investigated yet. In addition the actual consequences of non-response will be assessed, which will provide evidence on the extent of non-response bias.

Contact person:
Ulrich Krieger
 

Biomarker and record linkage project

A new perspective for aging research in Germany: linkages between disciplines (biology,medicine, economics, and social sciences) and linkages between data bases (socio-economic surveys, administrative records, and biomarkers)

Funded by the Volkswagen Foundation, the project aims at giving empirical aging research in Germany new perspectives by two kinds of linkages. First, the project will use the newly created infrastructure of the Network Aging Research Heidelberg-Mannheim (NAR) to link medical-biological with socio-economic research approaches. This requires data that are sufficiently detailed and precise to serve the needs of both research approaches. Second, we will therefore link the German part of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe  (SHARE) with
a) biomarkers: blood pressure; height; waist circumference; dried blood spots (HbA1c, c-reactive protein and cholesterol)
b)  administrative records of the German Pension Funds.
Using these data, we will investigate three exemplary research areas: (1) the twosided interaction between health and socio-economic status, (2) the implications of recent public policy interventions on the health of older citizens, (3) the causal link between biological aging processes with socially and economically induced health behaviors.

Contact persons:
Barbara Schaan (biomarker project)
Julie Korbmacher (record linkage project)
Christin Czaplicki (record linkage project)