The CLSA data access fee is $3,000 CDN. Additional fees are required by the provincial data centres to access the linked administrative health data. Please refer to DASH or contact the appropriate provincial data centre for the full fee schedule.
CLSA data holdings at provincial data centres will be limited to alphanumeric data, including questionnaire data, biomarker data, and select physical assessment data.
Administrative health data holdings may differ across provinces. Please refer to DASH, or the appropriate provincial data centre to learn more:
- British Columbia: Population Data BC
- Ontario: ICES
- New Brunswick: New Brunswick Institute for Research, Data and Training (NB-IRDT)
- Health Data Nova Scotia (HDNS)
To access the data, researchers will be required to apply through Health Data Research Network (HDRN) Canada’s Data Access Support Hub (DASH). DASH provides information on the availability of data assets, common algorithms, and data access processes across Canada, and offers centralized and coordinated data access support for researchers who require administrative data from more than one province. As of 2024, linked CLSA data are available for access in British Columbia, Ontario, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia, as per data access policies of participating provincial data centres and the CLSA.
Researchers who do not wish to access provincial administrative health data should apply for CLSA data through the regular CLSA Data Access process.
Periods of data collection for Follow-Up 1 (FUP1) assessments were as follows:
FUP1 Tracking: 2014-05 to 2018-12
FUP1 Comprehensive: 2015-07 to 2018-12
The CLSA updates its datasets on a regular basis with additional data, corrections and other updates. Such changes are always indicated by the version number of a dataset. When an update is ready, we send a Data Release Update email to all approved primary applicants, explaining the change(s). You will be able to request the updated dataset if you are approved for those data and you decide that the updates are relevant to your project.
Periods of data collection for Follow-up 2 (FUP2) assessments were as follows:
FUP2 Tracking: 2018-06 to 2021-09
FUP2 Comprehensive: 2018-04 to 2021-09
The CLSA takes great care to check the accuracy and completeness of the data prior to release. However, because of the size of the dataset and the large number of variables, we cannot guarantee the accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose of the data. It is the responsibility of each data user to verify their dataset, the accompanying data dictionaries and the data support documentation available under Researcher Resources on our website. If you think your data are incomplete or if you identify errors while conducting your analyses, please contact us at access@clsa-elcv.ca.
CLSA is working centrally on strategies to link individual level CLSA data with data from health administrative databases across Canada.
In 2021, the Health Data Research Network Canada (HDRN Canada) and the CLSA announced a partnership to enable linkage of the CLSA cohort data with data held at provincial data centres.
As of January 2024, linked CLSA data holdings are available in select provinces. Please visit the Administrative Health Data section for more information.
Linking of the CLSA data to third party data holdings by an approved user is prohibited. Any proposals for linkage must be approved by the CLSA Executive Committee, and executed internally by the CLSA. Six-digit postal codes or HIN data are never released to users.
No, CLSA data are only available through a direct application to the CLSA. For more information on how to apply, please consult Data Access.
Participant death is currently captured in three ways: 1) from the next of kin contacting the CLSA directly, 2) through the ‘maintaining contact’ telephone calls that occur between main waves of data collection, or 3) from linkage to provincial vital statistics. Mortality data is now available and includes participant status (vital and withdrawal status), as well as data from the Decendent Questionnaire. For detailed information, see Data Availability.
Within the CLSA dataset, derived variables (DVs) are variables that are created from other variables. DVs are derived by re-grouping or re-classifying the original variables, to glean information otherwise not available. Some DVs are based on published measures or scales. You will find documentation related to DVs under Researcher Resources.