ESDS Longitudinal provides: a web-based download service specialist user support (linking with specialist support provided by the Centre for Longitudinal Studies (CLS)) training and workshops and a range of value-added data enhancements for a number of key UK longitudinal data collections, including the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing

The English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA) is the first study in the UK to connect the full range of topics necessary to understand the economic, social, psychological and health elements of the ageing process. As many as a third of people in Britain are now aged 50 or over. This group of people is vitally important: it accounts for half the the nation's spending and three quarters of its wealth. Many people now retire earlier and enjoy an active and healthy retirement, but some struggle financially and/or suffer poor health. ELSA aims to study a sample of people over the age of 50 every two years in order to see how people's health, economic and social circumstances change over time. One of the study's key aims is to help the government plan for an ageing population and longer periods of retirement, and ensure that the UK's healthcare and pension systems will be able to meet everyone's needs.

ELSA is modelled on a similar study in the US (the Health and Retirement Study) and is being conducted jointly by National Centre for Social Research (NatCen), University College London (UCL) and the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS).

Users registered with the Economic and Social Data Service (ESDS) have access to the ELSA datasets via the download service or can analyse, visualise, subset and download selected data from ELSA via the online Nesstar software tool.

• ELSA datasets: www.esds.ac.uk/findingData/elsaTitles.asp
• ESDS Nesstar Catalogue: nesstar.esds.ac.uk/webview/index.jsp

The ELSA data currently available via ESDS are Waves 0-3. Wave 0 data comprise material from ELSA sample members collected in the three different Health Survey for England studies (1998, 1999 and 2001) used to construct the original ELSA sample.

Joint ELSA/SHARE database:

Users may request access to the ELSA portion of the data from a project to harmonise ELSA Wave 2 and SHARE Wave 1 (both 2004) data undertaken by Valeria Bordon at the University of Mannheim.

The SHARE portion of this joint database can be accessed via CentERdata: www.centerdata.nl/en/TopMenu/Databank/SHARE_data/.

An ELSA teaching data file has been created, containing information obtained from individual interviews and selfcompletion questionnaires from all 12,100 ELSA participants. The file contains less than a tenth of the variables available on the main ELSA file and is designed for use as a teaching aid and also as a sampler for new and potential users of the main data. Variable names are the same as those in the original ELSA dataset, held under SN 5050. The individual interview comprised the following twelve modules:

household demographics (variables prefixed DH) individual demographics (DI) health (HE) social participation (SP) work and pensions (WP) income and assets (IA) housing (HO) cognitive function (CF) expectations (EX) psycho-social health (PS) final questions (FQ) self-completion (SC)

The teaching dataset contains selected variables from each of these modules, with the exception of household demographics. In total there are 408 variables in the dataset.


There are a host of ELSA resources on the web. Interested users can search the following sites for information on key findings from the study, information about the study team and future plans and activities.

ELSA respondents' web site: www.natcen.ac.uk/elsa/index.htm NatCen Ageing Research: www.natcen.ac.uk/topic/ageing IFS ELSA web site: www.ifs.org.uk/elsa/index.php Health and Retirement Study (US): hrsonline.isr.umich.edu/ Survey of Health Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE): www.share-project.org/

Users are welcome to keep up-to-date with ELSA developments via the ESDS Longitudinal JISCmail list -
www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/ESDS-LONGITUDINAL.html

ESDS user documentation for ELSA can be downloaded in the form of a multi-volume user guide in PDF format from the ELSA catalogue record page. Alternatively, separate documentation for Waves 1 to 4 can be downloaded from the IFS ELSA documentation page (also in PDF format). ELSA study description: www.esds.ac.uk/findingData/snDescription.asp?sn=5050 IFS ELSA documentation: www.ifs.org.uk/elsa/documentation.php ELSA at the Survey Question Bank: www.surveynet.ac.uk/sqb/surveys/elsa.asp

L5050 Guide to English Longitudinal Study of Ageing