An overarching goal of ICPSR and its aging program, NACDA, is to build data resources that support the exploration and improvement of population health as part of the aging lifecourse. NACDA and ICPSR maintain one of the nation’s largest curated data collections containing linkable multi-level variables across multiple time periods. By providing value-added tools to support the use of these resources NACDA will increase the potential applications of existing and new data acquisitions, allowing for the examination of changing biomedical, social and community effects on health over time. To illustrate the problem, consider, a simple search for the term “health” across the NACDA and broader ICPSR collections. This concept represents a broad capture query, and results in a list of 8,464 studies on the ICPSR website, not all of them containing data on health outcomes. In contrast, a more refined search of the phrase “health outcomes” results in a list of 465 studies and 131 bibliographic citations but returns no specific variables that could be used and analysis framework. This result is not surprising as these kinds of search phrases are much more likely to appear in publications or in study-level descriptive metadata, while a variable level return would require the term “health outcome” to reside in the actual variable name. Similarly, there are numerous studies without the phrase “health outcomes” that contain health data (e.g., Survey of Texas Adults, 2004, ICPSR 4297, available through NACDA).NIH/NIA U24 AG056918 and NIH/NIA U24AG056918 01S1Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/145488/1/PAA 2018 Population Health.pdfDescription of PAA 2018 Population Health.pdf : PowerPoint Presentatio
