EdSHARe
Education Studies for Healthy Aging Research is an interdisciplinary, multisite, collaborative research project investigating the intersecting socioeconomic, institutional, and biological pathways through which education and early-life conditions impact later-life health and cognition. Learn more about EdSHARe Principal Investigators and the team.
Our Work
EdSHARe maintains two long-term cohort studies that began with large, diverse, nationally representative samples of American high school students: The National Longitudinal Study of the High School Class of 1972 (NLS:72) and High School and Beyond (HS&B:80).
What’s Special
EdSHARe data provide an invaluable resource for researchers to understand how education shapes cognitive and physical health, longevity, economic well-being, and psychosocial outcomes among older Americans. Read more about our data.
History
NLS:72 and HS&B:80 started as education cohort studies under the auspices of NCES to study how educational institutions, programs, environments, and experiences shape the lives of American young people. The EdSHARe team has—with the cooperation and approval of the National Center for Education Statistics' (NCES)—repurposed both studies to be important data resources for understanding the intersecting social, institutional, and biological pathways through which early life factors—especially education—impact later-life economic, labor force, health, and cognitive outcomes. Read more about the history of NLS:72 and HS&B:80.
Guiding Principles
As stewards of the HS&B:80 and NLS:72 cohort studies, the EdSHARe team abides by five core principles in making scientific and strategic decisions:
- Education is our paramount strength. Other population representative, longitudinal studies may have larger samples or better-quality measures in some domains. None come close to the wealth of information that HS&B:80 and NLS:72 have about the policy-relevant educational contexts, opportunities, and outcomes of people who attended high school in the early 1970s and 1980s.
- Attention to population heterogeneity. H&B:80 and NLS:72 have the potential to uncover causes and solutions to disparities in later life cognitive, health, longevity, economic, and other outcomes. The harmonized cohort design with large, population representative samples of people now around ages 60 (HS&B:80) and 70 (NLS:72) who represent the full diversity of Americans’ socioeconomic background, gender, race and ethnicity, and geography is a vital resource for understanding how people age. Preserving the representativeness and sample heterogeneity of the longitudinal samples is of paramount importance.
- Multidisciplinary perspective. Fully articulating whether, through what processes, and for whom education shapes later life cognition, health, economic well-being, and other outcomes requires a fundamentally interdisciplinary research team that works well together and that is committed to high quality science.
- Commitment to high quality science. Demands imposed by the complex nature of the HS&B:80 and NLS:72 designs, protocols, data ownership, and data sharing arrangements means that “success” is a high bar. EdSHARe is unwavering in maintaining best principles of science and excellent relationships with participants.
- Data for all researchers to use. We produce high quality data, documentation, and metadata for the interdisciplinary research community to access and use for impactful research. This requires a commitment to securely releasing data as quickly as possible, to expanding and diversifying the community of scholars using the data, and to supporting the research community to make efficient and effective use of the data.