Tags & Taxonomy
A primary goal of The People Say is to provide access to a qualitative dataset that enriches and expands on the quantitative data about older adults that's typically referenced by policymakers. Our database of nearly 2,400 units of qualitative data is pulled from more than 100 hours of interviews with older adults, caregivers, and subject matter experts. You can search the database by keyword, or you can browse all 2,000+ entries, filtering by more than 100 detailed tags.
About Our Topic Tags
Our 108 topic and subtopic tags were developed with reference to the primary keywords or taxonomies used by five major longitudinal studies of American older adults, specifically:
- The Health and Retirement Survey (HRS)—Aging in the 21st Century: Challenges and Opportunities for Americans
- Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey (MCBS)
- National Health and Aging Trends Study (NHATS)
- Older Americans 2020: Key Indicators of Well-Being
- 2023 Profile of Older Americans
With those studies as a starting point, we developed a taxonomy to categorize the content included on The People Say. Every data unit included in our database is tagged per this taxonomy. You can filter our database by these tags when you search the database; additionally, on any given data-unit page, clicking on any topic or subtopic tag will generate a result of all data on this site with that tag.
Links to Related Data & Research
On Data Pages
To make it easy to find quantitative data that augment our qualitative data, on each one of our data units, we've also provided links to related data in summary reports from the sources above (except the MCBS, which doesn't have an easy-access summary report).
Note that approximately 40% of our subtopic tags do not have related data in the quantitative surveys. We think this speaks to the meaningful difference in the kind of data that in-person, human-centered research can generate. Our participants shared aspects of their lived experience that survey instruments are unlikely to collect.
On Insights Pages
In addition to linking out to major quantitative studies from our data pages, we've also provided links to selected studies and articles on each one of our Insights pages. These related resources were selected by members of our advisory committee.
Review the Complete Taxonomy
See the table below for a complete listing of our topics and subtopics, as well as the related sections of the reports we've associated with the subtopics.