SHARE - Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe - Wave 7

The Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), is a longitudinal micro-data infrastructure created in response to a communication by the European Commission (2000) to the Council and the European Parliament, which identified population ageing and its social and economic challenges to growth and prosperity to be among the most pressing challenges of the 21st century in Europe. SHARE has also become one of the most prestigious social science infrastructures and was in 2011 the first to be appointed a European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC) by the European Council.The overarching objective of SHARE is to better understand the interactions between bio-medical factors, the socio-economic environment and policy interventions in the ageing European populations.

SHARE aims to achieve this objective by providing a research infrastructure for fundamental science as well as a tool for policy evaluation and design. Initiated in 2002, SHARE is scheduled to launch, all in all, 10 data collection waves. At present eight waves have been fulfilled and seven waves are available to the research community.