Improving survey measures of time and money help given and received due to hardships of the COVID-19 pandemic
Principal Investigator
I-Fen Lin, Professor of Sociology, Bowling Green State University
Principal Investigator
Judith Seltzer, Research Professor, Department of Sociology, University of California Los Angeles
This project will develop a coding scheme and code open-ended responses to questions about help given and received in the 2020 Health and Retirement Study (HRS). The questions obtain complete information about who helped older adults during the crisis of the pandemic, and to whom older adults gave pandemic-related help. These new data will provide a better understanding of older adults’ support networks, as well as disparities in how much social support older adults can draw on to mitigate the health and economic challenges they faced during the pandemic. We also will work with HRS to make the new data available to the broader research community.