“NACDA: Data on Aging Resources from Research Ideation to Long-Term Preservation and Sharing” by James W. McNally of the University of Michigan and NACDA Program on Aging, United States, and Kathryn Lavender of the NACDA Program on Aging, United States, has been announced as a workshop to be presented at The 2nd European Conference on Aging & Gerontology (EGen2022).
The presentation will also be available for IAFOR Members to view online. To find out more, please visit the IAFOR Membership page.
Abstract
NACDA: Data on Aging Resources from Research Ideation to Long-Term Preservation and Sharing
Research serves the general good of the public, and the value of research data increases as it becomes discoverable, reusable, and applicable to a variety of industries and disciplines. Data archives allow research data to be distributed widely and in multiple formats, enabling the research community to share and reuse data on-demand and keep the data safe and preserved. As data archives and the research community become more efficient with data sharing and preservation, the data materials can become more accessible, which can benefit a variety of disciplines and enable team science/multidisciplinary research opportunities. The National Archive of Computerized Data on Aging (NACDA) is one of several social science data archives focusing on data on aging. Our mission is to advance research on aging populations and be a resource to the research community. NACDA offers data from all over the globe. Our archival system also provides a mechanism for the equitable distribution of data resources, so it can be used by any researcher, supporting a multitude of research opportunities.
This workshop, sponsored by IAFOR and NACDA, will offer hands-on examples of discovering data resources, obtaining them, and then implementing them as part of a research strategy. This workshop will facilitate your work, whether you are a student looking for a thesis topic, an instructor looking for research material to use in classroom teaching, or an established researcher looking for new opportunities. The wealth of publicly available data has created almost unlimited opportunities to explore new themes and collaborate with other researchers worldwide. NACDA has been in existence for over 35 years, and it preserves and distributes over 1,500 studies on the lifecourse and health in the United States and worldwide. Funded by the National Institute on Aging in the United States, NACDA represents one of the world’s largest research data collections.
The workshop will introduce you to the data resources NACDA offers and its many research partners worldwide. All researchers attending The 2nd European Conference on Aging & Gerontology (EGen2022), The 10th European Conference on Education (ECE2022), or The 10th European Conference on Language Learning (ECLL2022) are welcome to participate in this workshop. We invite you to ask questions and learn about data resources you can use for research, classroom instruction, or developing a research paper or thesis for your college classes. All you need is your laptop or mobile device, and our instructors will help you better understand the wealth of information that lies at your fingertips. If you would like to send us questions in advance of the workshop, please email icpsr-nacda@umich.edu in advance of the conference, and we will try to incorporate your questions into the content.
Speaker Biographies
James W. McNally
University of Michigan & NACDA Program on Aging, United States
Dr James W. McNally is the Director of the NACDA Program on Aging, a data archive containing over 1,500 studies related to health and the aging lifecourse. He currently does methodological research on the improvement and enhancement of secondary research data and has been cited as an expert authority on data imputation. Dr McNally has directed the NACDA Program on Aging since 1998 and has seen the archive significantly increase its holdings with a growing collection of seminal studies on the aging lifecourse, health, retirement and international aspects of aging. He has spent much of his career addressing methodological issues with a specific focus on specialized application of incomplete or deficient data and the enhancement of secondary data for research applications. Dr McNally has also worked extensively on issues related to international aging and changing perspectives on the role of family support in the later stages of the aging lifecourse.
Kathryn M. Lavender
NACDA Program on Aging, United States
Kathryn joined the National Archive of Computerized Data on Aging (NACDA) team in November 2017 as project manager. She is involved with day to day operations including data deposits, restricted-use data agreements, data user requests, as well as long-term planning of NACDA activities in the research community.
Before transitioning to NACDA, Kathryn Lavender came to the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) from the University of Michigan-Dearborn as a co-op student, and accepted a full-time position after graduating with her degree in economics. She has been involved in many areas of ICPSR, from curating data across different projects and supervising curation staff to event planning with the summer internship program. As of this April, Kathryn has been an official ICPSR staff member for 10 years.
