Linking longitudinal studies of ageing with administrative data: First interim report

Gasteen, Anne, Douglas, Elaine and Bell, David (2022) Linking longitudinal studies of ageing with administrative data: First interim report (The ESRC Centre for Population Change Working Paper Series) ESRC Centre for Population Change 35pp.

Abstract

The Linking Longitudinal Studies of Ageing with Administrative Data project is an ESRC Centre for Population Change (CPC) project. The project remit is to evaluate the administrative data linkage of the surveys belonging to the Health and Retirement Studies (HRS) family on the Gateway to Global Ageing (G2G) platform. It aims to provide a detailed understanding of linked studies’ content, use, challenges and value added.
The HRS’ common aim is to better understand the issues affecting older people in their national populations, tracking and identifying changes over time. Cross-country comparisons are enabled by the G2G’s production of harmonized datasets for the studies. This report provides an initial overview of current and planned HRS survey linkage based on publicly available information and documentation on individual study websites and the G2G platform.
Linkage of routinely collected administrative data to longitudinal surveys can: provide better quality, more accurate data, reducing respondent burden and survey costs, identify bias and maintain representativeness. There are, however, substantial challenges to linkage viz: complex data ownership, ethical and legal issues resulting in lengthy application and approval processes, inflexible access protocols, considerable data cleaning, linkage methodology and accuracy.
Ten of the eighteen HRS family surveys currently hosted on the G2G platform were found to be linked to administrative data. In general, the HRS family of surveys do not appear to be as advanced with respect to administrative data linkage as other longitudinal studies. The exception to this is the US HRS and, to a lesser extent, the ELSA and SHARE studies.
Three initial observations may be made. Firstly, where linkages exist, these are often intermittent and can become dated by the time the linked data are available. Secondly, the
development of linkage across the different studies is piecemeal and generally not uniform; surveys are linked to different types of data depending on data access conditions within different countries and study interests. Lastly, microlevel data linkage appears to be most successful and/or consistent where this has been built into the development and design of a survey at the outset and when there is political or legal weight behind this.

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