The data collection in COMPARE is linked to the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). SHARE collects longitudinal data on European citizens aged 50 and over and covers the domains of health, psychology, sociology and economics. SHARE started in 2004 in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, The Netherlands, Switzerland, Sweden and Spain. A total of approximately 18,000 households and 27,000 respondents participated. Many of the measures in SHARE are subjective measures or self-assessments, creating opportunities for using vignettes. In 2004 eight countries already conducted a pre-test of vignettes on health and work disability (about 400 respondents per country, on average).

In 2006 and 2007, new interviews are held with the respondents who participated in 2004, and with new respondents. Moreover, SHARE will be extended with several countries, including Poland and the Czech Republic. The vignette questionnaires are applied to about 520 households (780 respondents) per country in eleven SHARE countries (Sweden, Denmark, Germany, The Netherlands, Belgium, France, Italy, Spain, Greece, Czech Republic, and Poland). In the countries that participated in the pretest in 2004 (all countries except Denmark, Czech Republic and Poland), the aim is to administer the vignettes as much as possible to those respondents who already participated in the pre-test of 2004. The data will be used to construct conversion factors, which can be applied to facilitate cross-national comparisons. Second, the longitudinal data on vignettes on health and work disability combining SHARE 2004 with COMPARE will make it possible to investigate changes in norms along with changes in health, or other changes in personal conditions.

Data collection is completed in September 2007. As soon as possible a first release of the data will be made available for scientific research free of charge to all interested researchers, in the same way as the SHARE data.