ICPSR Current Events in the Bib - New ISR Director Dr. Kathleen Cagney!
ICPSR shared this great article mentioning the new ISR Director, Dr. Kathleen Cagney, the NACDA Colectica portal, and NIA funded studies - NSHAP, MIDUS, and NHATS:
"Newly named ISR director is co-investigator on a major longitudinal study of aging, available at ICPSR and via an enhanced portal for researchers.
Newly named ISR director is co-investigator on a major longitudinal study of aging, available at ICPSR and via an enhanced portal for researchers. Dr. Kathleen Cagney will begin this fall as the director of the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research (ISR), home of ICPSR. Among the other positions she holds, she is a senior fellow on the NORC/University of Chicago-led study, the National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project (NSHAP), which is distributed by the National Archive of Computerized Data on Aging (NACDA) at ICPSR. NACDA wanted to add value to these data to enhance potential reuse, beyond what already occurs as a result of the standard data curation process. In late 2018, NACDA received funding from the National Institute on Aging to provide NSHAP data in the NACDA Colectica Portal, where users can utilize variable-level conceptual groupings. The portal allows data users to see the NSHAP series in a table format, displaying in a user-friendly way what variables were present during each round of the study. Within the portal, users can even create custom data and documentation extracts. To provide this functionality, Colectica uses a metadata standard begun at ICPSR and now used worldwide: the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI). It acts as the foundation for longitudinal variable-level concept grouping by ICPSR staff.
Having a way to explore a dense set of variables-- and to visualize their incarnations over time-- is especially helpful when using a multiple-round series like NSHAP. Begun in 2005, the study set out to examine how the health of older adults is influenced by social support and personal relationships, and so interviewed a nationally representative sample of adults aged 57 to 85. In 2015, in the third round, all surviving respondents were again interviewed and a new cohort of respondents born between 1948 and 1965 during the Baby Boom was added along with their spouses and partners. Round 4 and a special 2020 NSHAP-COVID Study are underway, as well.
Many authors use NSHAP data in conjunction with other national studies on aging like Midlife in the United States (MIDUS), also distributed by NACDA, and the National Health and Aging Trends Study (NHATS). To assist researchers in this endeavor, NACDA staff have developed cross series comparisons. In the Colectica portal, they have identified comparable variables within concepts such as health and cognition, defining variable matches between NSHAP and NHATS, as well as NSHAP and MIDUS. Researchers also publish papers that make use of NSHAP data in conjunction with many other types of data, for instance Census or crime data. One example of the latter is Dr. Cagney’s 2019 article, “Crime, perceived danger, and adiposity: The role of gender,” in the Journal of Aging and Health, in which the authors analyzed second round NSHAP data merged with county-level geocoded FBI crime data. Check out the NSHAP series home page to see hundreds of other publications using NSHAP data. "
Check out more ICPSR Current Events in the Bib by visiting the ICPSR bibliography events site page.
Jun 9, 2021