Residential Relocation and Participant Retention in the National Children's Study

Residential relocation of participants in longitudinal studies can threaten the reliability and generalizability of research findings by diminishing response rates and increasing attrition over time. In longitudinal studies of maternal and child health, such as the National Children’s Study (NCS), high participant retention is critical in order to collect the data needed during each of the developmental stages of a child’s life. For the NCS, maintaining participant engagement was especially crucial to conduct recurrent post-natal interviews and administer in-person specimen collections, neither of which would be possible without key methods to identify and retain participants who relocate from one address to another. This presentation will explore the approaches used and best practices learned from tracking and retaining over a two-year period a cohort of more than 2,500 young children and their primary caregivers, recruited from 27 states in the Eastern and Central regions of the United States. The NCS defined relocation as a change in the primary residential address of the child. Relocation information was collected through surveys administered at each study visit and through various operational strategies such as providing participants with a hotline to inform the study they were relocating, providing field interviewers with a checklist and script tailored to addressing relocation, and mailings which included a “let us know you’re moving” card. Findings will be presented based on our evaluation of the utility of the retention focused operational strategies employed and discuss how future longitudinal studies might incorporate these strategies to maximize retention of participants who relocate.