This project, funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), coordinates all activities involved in the context of generating, processing, and administering baseline and refreshment gross sample data. This is particularly important in a study like SHARE, which is conducted in many countries and is thus facing different legal and administrative backgrounds.
In order to ensure participating countries to adhere to SHARE’s standards and to maintain an overview of differing national sampling procedures, the project develops, revises, and distributes sampling design forms to all countries with baseline or refreshment samples. Technical assistance is provided to country teams throughout the process of generating proper gross samples. This includes the development and provision of a template file to be filled by country teams; the countries’ input is then further processed for various purposes.
The significance for SHARE’s central coordination to receive proper gross samples on files is manifold: Firstly, they are needed for the preparation of baseline/refreshment sample preload files for the computer assisted interview. Secondly, without well-defined gross samples no meaningful computation of measures of fieldwork performance is possible. Thirdly, sampling information is needed to compute design and calibrated weights.
