Researchers of the ARC Centre of Excellence in Population Ageing Research have today released an online webtool – the Metadata Database on Ageing – which assists researchers working in ageing to understand what survey data is available in Australia and how to gain access.
"Evidence-driven gerontology or demography research relies on rigorous population-based empirical data," said Jeromey Temple, CEPAR Associate Professor of Demography at the University of Melbourne.
"The knowledge of and access to population-based data, which includes mature age respondents, is critical for researchers working in ageing.
"The collection of metadata – the information describing data – supports us researchers in our search for relevant data and can help inform an epistemological map of the 'state of play' in Australian gerontology," he said.
Over the past two years, the research team based at the Melbourne School of Population and Global Health has developed a database that includes metadata on Australian sample surveys relevant to ageing over the period from 2010 to 2018.
The researchers then created an online tool – the Metadata Database on Ageing – that enables web users to search and export metadata and obtain
