The Health and Retirement Study recruits a new cohort of older US adults every six years. During the 2016 recruitment effort that enrolled the Late Baby Boomer (LBB) cohort, those born 1954 to 1959, the HRS also pre-identified financial units that would become eligible for the Early Generation X (EGX) cohort, those born 1966 to 1971, in 2022. A similar process was done during 2022 recruitment to pre-identify financial units that would be eligible for the Mid Generation X (MGX) cohort, those born 1972 to 1977, in the 2028 recruitment. In 2019, the pre-identified EGX financial units were offered a shortened version of the baseline questionnaire ~3 years in advance of their scheduled recruitment year. This process was replicated in 2025 for the pre-identified MGX financial units. Financial units that completed the shortened version in 2019 went on to respond at much higher rates during their 2022 baseline recruitment compared to freshly screened cases, because they had already been brought into the study with the shorter version of the baseline. We compared the response rate from the 2025 MGX shorter questionnaire recruitment in 2025 with the full (not shortened) EGX baseline in 2022. Each were capped at the same level of effort: 6 total FTF and TEL attempts. The EGX response rate (17.9%) was about 10 percentage points lower than the MGX response rate (27.5%). Therefore, with the same amount of effort, the shorter baseline increased the response rate to the baseline by about 10 percentage points.
Submitted by: Heather Schroeder
NIMLAS Topics: Survey Burden 
, Differential Attrition 