National Archive of Computerized Data on Aging
A few years ago officials at the National Institute on Aging asked themselves what the knowledge yield had been from their decades of support for research on aging. While there were positive answers to the question, the officials also found that there were contradictions among the findings from NIA supported-research, and there were substantial gaps in knowledge. They wondered what they might do in the future to bring more consistency to the research results and to spot the gaps in knowledge more easily.
One of the solutions they settled on was data sharing, or more precisely, the creation of a data infrastructure for gerontological research. If researchers could have access to the data of fellow researchers, they would have a tool for resolving differences in findings that is not afforded by published articles alone. They would be able to exploit hard-to-collect but underutilized datasets. Moreover, greater availability of data within an ordered infrastructure could create a synergy among researchers that might accelerate the acquisition of knowledge about aging.
NIA entered into a partnership with the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), the organization that has long been the umbrella organization for database managers in the social (not the psychological) sciences. The result is the National Archive of Computerized Data on Aging (www.icpsr.umich.edu/NACDA).
NACDA performs three important services. It actively seeks out datasets and adds them to the archive. It processes the data, putting them into a form that makes them easy for researchers to use and that makes it possible to relate one dataset to another. And it provides the technical support scientists need to make effective use of this valuable and growing data resource. An important feature of the way NACDA operates is that it has a council of stakeholders from the sciences that contribute and use the data. The NACDA Council helps make decisions about such things as what to acquire and how to evolve the archive in ways that assure fulfillment of its mission to advance research on aging by helping researchers to profit from the under-exploited potential of a broad range of datasets.
The philosophy of NACDA is much like that at the Murray Center: To know aging, a multidisciplinary approach is needed. Thus, NACDA contains data from medical science, demography, economics, sociology, psychology, and many other disciplines as well. More than 100 of NACDA's datasets are free and publicly accessible. Because ICPSR is an umbrella organization for database managers, it is also possible to gain access to over 500 additional datasets not directly managed by ICPSR.
Policies governing the use of these datasets vary, and use of some of them requires paying a fee. Moreover, access to many of the datasets is restricted to ICPSR members. If your institution is an ICPSR affiliate, then you have the potential to use these other datasets. To find out if your institution is part of the club, go to www.icpsr.umich.edu/MEMBERSHIP/ors.html.
NACDA is also a gateway to datasets that are located neither in NACDA nor in an ICPSR-affiliated archive. Again, policies will differ with the vendor. But NACDA is your portal to vast stores of easy-to-use data on aging. ICPSR also manages the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Data Archive (www.icpsr.umich.edu/SAMHDA). Its policies and even the look and feel of the database site are similar to NACDA's. In fact, ICPSR's effort to give its databases a common front-end look is one of the user-friendly design considerations that perhaps should be more generally applied to the data archives of the behavioral and social sciences.
