Commission Decision of 17 March 2011 setting up the SHARE-ERIC (2011/166/EU)

Article 3 U.K. Tasks

(1) SHARE-ERIC shall build an infrastructure of micro data of households and individuals necessary to understand individual and societal ageing (hereinafter also referred to as ‘the Survey’). Its main tasks are:

(a) to design a core survey instrument which captures the essential information on the economic, health, and family/social conditions of life of individuals aged 50 and older and their partners;

(b) to administer this survey instrument every two years to a panel of respondents in each participating countries and to maintain contact to all panel members between panel waves;

(c) to assemble the collected information in a user-friendly data base accessible to all scientific researchers subject to applicable data confidentiality restrictions and to maintain this data base including basic data cleaning, imputation, and documentation.

(2) The current prototype of SHARE shall be upgraded along three dimensions:

(a) prolong SHARE over time in order to generate a genuine panel that follows individuals as they age and react to the changes in the social and economic environment. The upgrade will add seven further waves every two years in three phases as defined in Article 8;

(b) expand SHARE to include all EU Member States;

(c) increase sample size of SHARE in order to make the Survey usable also for with-in-country analyses. In general, the target sample size shall be 6 000 individuals aged 50 and older in each member country.

(3) The SHARE-ERIC shall pursue its tasks on a non-economic basis.