Susanne Kelfve is a Ph.D. student at the Department of Sociology at Stockholm University and a member of the SWEOLD group at ARC. She has a Master’s degree in sociology, with special emphasis on investigative research and statistics. Susanne has a particular interest in methodological issues, especially the challenges posed when designing and conducting surveys of the elderly population and particularly in relation to health trends among the oldest old.

Her current work is focused on the impact of a representative study population and the use of proxy interviews in population based surveys. The primary aim is to investigate the impact of study design and response rate on different health outcomes among the oldest old. A further aim is to investigate how well different groups of the elderly population are represented in the study groups, and thereby represented in the research.

Susanne is also involved in the data collection for SWEOLD 2010, in particular the collection of saliva samples for genotyping. The genetic information obtained from the samples will be used to investigate the association between genes and health in late life, in relation to both social and contextual factors.