SHARE is a unique panel database of micro data on health, socio-economic status and social and family networks covering most of the European Union and Israel. To date, SHARE has collected three panel waves (2004, 2006, 2010) of current living circumstances and retrospective life histories (2008, SHARELIFE); 6 additional waves are planned until 2024. The more than 150 000 interviews give a broad picture of life after the age of 50 years, measuring physical and mental health, economic and non-economic activities, income and wealth, transfers of time and money within and outside the family as well as life satisfaction and well-being. The data are available to the scientific community free of charge at www.share-project.org after registration. SHARE is harmonized with the US Health and Retirement Study (HRS) and the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA) and has become a role model for several ageing surveys worldwide. SHARE's scientific power is based on its panel design that grasps the dynamic character of the ageing process, its multidisciplinary approach that delivers the full picture of individual and societal ageing, and its cross-nationally ex-ante harmonized design that permits international comparisons of health, economic and social outcomes in Europe and the USA.

We evaluated five competing hypotheses about what predicts romantic interest. Through a half-block quasi-experimental design, a large sample of young adults (i.e., responders; n = 335) viewed videos of opposite-sex persons (i.e., targets) talking about themselves and responders rated the targets’ traits and their romantic interest in the target. We tested whether similarity, dissimilarity, or overall trait levels on mate value, physical attractiveness, life history strategy, and the Big-Five personality factors predicted romantic interest at zero acquaintance, and whether sex acted as a moderator. We tested the responders’ individual perception of the targets’ traits, in addition to the targets’ own self-reported trait levels and a consensus rating of the targets made by the responders. We used polynomial regression with response surface analysis within multilevel modeling to test support for each of the hypotheses. Results suggest a large sex difference in trait perception; when women rated men, they agreed in their perception more often than when men rated women. However, as a predictor of romantic interest, there were no sex differences. Only the responders’ perception of the targets’ physical attractiveness predicted romantic interest; specifically, responders’ who rated the targets’ physical attractiveness as higher than themselves reported more romantic interest.

The fabrication of an entire interview, is a rare event in the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) but can nevertheless lead to negative consequences regarding the panel sample, such as a loss in sample size or the need for time-consuming data corrections of information collected in previous waves. The work presented in this article started with the discovery of a case of interviewer fabrication after fieldwork for the sixth wave of SHARE was completed. As a consequence, we developed a technical procedure to identify interview fabrication and deal with it during ongoing fieldwork in the seventh wave. Unlike previous work that often used small experimental datasets and/or only a few variables to identify fake interviews, we implemented a more complex approach with a multivariate cluster analysis using many indicators from the available CAPI data and paradata. Analyses with the known outcome (interview fabrication or not) in wave 6 revealed that we were able to correctly identify a large number of the truly faked interviews while keeping the rate of ‘false alarms’ rather low. With these promising results, we started using the same script during the fieldwork for wave 7. We provided the survey agencies with information for targeted (instead of random) back checks to increase the likelihood of confirming our initial suspicion. The results show that only a very small number of interview fabrications could be unequivocally identified.

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