The health, work, and retirement study: representing experiences of later life in Aotearoa New Zealand

Older adults represent a large and growing section of Aotearoa New Zealand's population. Longitudinal research on experiences of later life enables understanding of both the capabilities with which people are ageing, and their determinants. The Health, Work, and Retirement (HWR) study has to date conducted eight biennial longitudinal postal surveys of health and well-being with older people (n = 11,601 respondents; 49.4% of Māori descent). Survey data are linked at the individual-level to other modes of data collection, including cognitive assessments, life course history interviews, and national health records. This article describes the HWR study and its potential to support our understanding of ageing in Aotearoa New Zealand. We present an illustrative analysis of data collected to date, using indicators of physical health-related functional ability from n = 10,728 adults aged 55–80 to describe mean trajectories of physical ability with age, by birth cohort and gender. As the original participant cohort recruited in 2006 reach ages 71–86 in 2022, future directions for study include expanding the study's core longitudinal measures to include follow-up assessments of cognitive functioning to understand factors predicting cognitive decline, and linkage to national datasets to identify population-level profiles of risk for conditions such as frailty.