Summer Workshop on Comparative Studies on Aging

a Workshop

Sunday, 08/23/2020 to 08/28/2020.   ARCHIVED EVENT

Location: Jackson Hole, Wyoming

Deadline for submission is March 20, 2020.

We are pleased to announce that the Gateway to Global Aging Data (Gateway) Team at the University of Southern California has launched the Call for Applications for a Summer Workshop on Comparative Studies on Aging, which will take place August 23 – 28, 2020. In collaboration with the OECD’s long-term care team, this year’s workshop will focus on Long Term Care. The aim of this workshop is to stimulate comparative analyses of aging using the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) and its sister surveys around the world to further our understanding of how different social, cultural, environmental, and institutional contexts influence aging. We aim to develop and disseminate new approaches for comparative analyses on this topic by bringing together substantive science, quantitative methodology, data, and context experts. The Gateway Workshop provides both junior and senior researchers an opportunity to learn about social, environmental, and institutional context differences, as well as micro data availability and comparability issues, and to engage in discussion to form research questions, to conduct analyses in small groups, and to work towards publications.

Formal and informal long-term care arrangements, including their costs and quality, are an emerging area of concern in global public health, in health-systems research, and in policy-making. Despite growing interest, current knowledge is very limited. This is particularly the case for the areas of end-of-life care and dementia care, and governments in several developed countries, including the U.S., have called for increased research in these areas. HRS and its sister datasets provide high-quality longitudinal data on care arrangements for older adults, following community-residing older adults over time, including those transitioning to nursing homes.

Importantly, these studies conduct next-of-kin interviews of the deceased, often referred to as end- of-life interviews, thereby providing a unique opportunity to study this high priority research topic.

The Gateway team has developed easy-to-use, harmonized data files for both core interview data and end-of-life data, reducing the time and efforts required to build comparable data for cross-country analyses. In partnership with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and

Development (OECD), the Gateway team is currently in the process of incorporating institutional information into the Gateway.

The Workshop will start with the substantive, contextual, and data experts’ presentations, followed by extensive small-group discussions through which research questions will be formed and comparative analyses will be carried out to study high-priority research topics. To facilitate such collaboration, we ask all interested participants to submit a brief description of the research questions they are interested in pursuing during the Workshop. In addition to team members from the Gateway to Global Aging Data at USC and the Long Term Care Team at the OECD, the following substantive, contextual, and data experts will also participate in small-group discussion and facilitate the collaborative research process, leading toward the publication of collaborative products.

Eric Bonsang, Paris Dauphine University
Eric French, University College London
Hideki Hashimoto, University of Tokyo
Hidehiko Ichimura, University of Arizona and University of Tokyo
Arie Kapteyn, University of Southern California
Kenneth Langa, University of Michigan
Giacomo Pasini, Universita’ Ca’ Foscari – Venezia
David Weir, University of Michigan

Submission for the Workshop Applications are open to both junior and senior researchers in economics and other social sciences, medicine, and public health. Interested researchers are invited to submit CV and an abstract, describing the research questions they are interested in investigating, to gateway.workshop@g2aging.org. The deadline for submission is March 20, 2020. The suggested topics for the Workshop include, but are not limited to, the following:

(1) Social protection: policy variations in generosity and public coverage of long-term care costs and their implications for out-of-pocket costs;
(2) Determinants of care provision: policy variations on the provision of institutional and home care, long-term care labor market supplies, and their implications;
(3) Caregivers: social and cultural variations in family caregiving; health effects of caregiving;
(4) Economic costs of dementia: health care and caregiving costs for persons with dementia;
(5) Dementia care: dementia care policies and their impacts on persons with dementia and their caregivers; and
(6) End-of-life care: end of life arrangements, costs, aggressive care, and their impacts. Economy-class travel and accommodation costs will be covered by the organizers. Invited researchers are expected to (a) actively participate in the workshop for the ENTIRE WORKSHOP PERIOD, (b) contribute to the development of a scientific paper, and (c) continue to work on the paper for publication after the workshop.

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