The China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS) is a

longitudinal survey A longitudinal study (or longitudinal survey, or panel study) is a research design that involves repeated observations of the same variables (e.g., people) over short or long periods of time (i.e., uses longitudinal data). It is often a type of obs ...

being conducted by the

China Center for Economic Research The China Center for Economic Research (CCER) is an economics think tank in Peking University, China. It was opened in August 1994, and is directed by Justin Yifu Lin. In1998, it introduced the Beijing International MBA at Peking University ...

Peking University Peking University (PKU; ) is a public research university in Beijing, China. The university is funded by the Ministry of Education. Peking University was established as the Imperial University of Peking in 1898 when it received its royal charter ...

with Professor Yaohui Zhao of Peking University serving as Principal Investigator and Professor
John Strauss
of the University of Southern California and Albert Park of

HKUST Institute for Emerging Market Studies HKUST Institute for Emerging Market Studies (HKUST IEMS) is a university-level institute under thOffice of the Vice-President for Research and Graduate Studiesof The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). It is launched on May 27 ...

serving as co-Principal Investigators.

Goals

The survey will collect a

representative sample In statistics, quality assurance, and survey methodology, sampling is the selection of a subset (a statistical sample) of individuals from within a statistical population to estimate characteristics of the whole population. Statisticians attempt ...

of Chinese 45 and older every two years to enable multidisciplinary studies on issues related to

population ageing Population ageing is an increasing median age in a population because of declining fertility rates and rising life expectancy. Most countries have rising life expectancy and an ageing population, trends that emerged first in developed countries b ...

. China is one of the fastest ageing countries in the world and accounts for a large fraction of the growth in the world's old. By 2050, China's elderly (65 and older) population share is expected to reach 30%.

Funding

The pilot survey is funded by the National Institute on Aging, the World Bank, and

Natural Science Foundation of China The National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC; ) is an organization directly affiliated to China's State Council for the management of the National Natural Science Fund. History NSFC was founded in February 1986 by theoretical chemist Tan ...

Data Collection

The questionnaire contains information on household demographics, transfers among family members, health status, health care, employment, income, consumption and assets, as well as information on health facilities of the community and government policies in local areas. The CHARLS is designed on the models of health and retirement studies originated from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) in the U.S., but has the advantage of including information on the community the respondent resides and local policies. Due to large internal variations of government policies, the data will enable analyses of policy impacts in the process of population ageing. Other countries participating in this international network of ageing studies include England, fifteen countries in continental Europe, Israel, India, Korea, and

Japan Japan ( ja, 日本, or , and formally , ''Nihonkoku'') is an island country in East Asia. It is situated in the northwest Pacific Ocean, and is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan, while extending from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north ...

Initial Results

The pilot survey was conducted in two provinces ( Zhejiang and

Gansu Gansu (, ; alternately romanized as Kansu) is a province in Northwest China. Its capital and largest city is Lanzhou, in the southeast part of the province. The seventh-largest administrative district by area at , Gansu lies between the Tibet ...

) in 2008 and collected data on roughly 1,600 households. The pilot data of 2008 has been released to the research community since April 30, 2009. The national baseline survey is being planned for 2011. CHARLS data will be available for download by researchers at no cost.

Sister studies

The Health and Retirement Study The Health and Retirement Study (HRS) is a longitudinal survey of a representative sample of Americans over age 50 conducted by the Survey Research Center (SRC) at the Institute for Social Research (ISR) at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor ...

(HRS) * English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA) *

The Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe The Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) is a multidisciplinary and cross-national panel database of micro data on health, socio-economic status and social and family networks. In seven survey waves to date, SHARE has conduc ...

(SHARE)
Korean Longitudinal Study of Ageing
(KLoSA)

External links

China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study

Contact Page - Zhao Yaohui

Contact Page - John Strauss

Albert Park

Study on global AGEing and adult health (SAGE)

References

{{Health in the People's Republic of China Health in China Gerontology Retirement