Seeking to Reduce Motivated Underreporting to the Health and Retirement Study Screening Interview

• Activity Number: 303
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Tuesday, August 5, 2014 : 8:30 AM to 10:20 AM
• Sponsor: Survey Research Methods Section
• Author(s): Frost Hubbard*+ and Daniel Tomlin and Theresa Camelo
• Companies: Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan and University of Michigan and Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan
• Keywords: Coverage ; Nonresponse ; Screening interviews ; Health and Retirement Study ; Household rostering methods ; Eligibility

Abstract

Interviewer administered household surveys with age specific target populations generally have three options for identifying age eligible households: (1) full enumeration of all household members and their ages; (2) directly asking the household informant if anyone in the household is in the desired age range; and (3) asking a few, brief questions about the age range of household members to isolate if the household is eligible without explicitly identifying the desired age range. Tourangeau et al. (2012) conducted a centralized telephone experiment examining these three methods and found that the full enumeration method produced the highest eligibility rates and lowest response rates, indicating a tradeoff between coverage and nonresponse errors when choosing between the three methods. In an experiment sponsored by the Health and Retirement Study, we attempted to replicate these findings for an in-person screening of persons in a 6 year age cohort. Our results showed trends that the full enumeration of all household members produced higher eligibility and similar response rates compared to the other two methods. Potential reasons for these findings will be discussed.