Online Program

331682
Residential Relocation and Participant Retention in the National Children's Study


Tuesday, November 3, 2015

Sheldonn Plummer, BA, Health Sciences Department, NORC at the University of Chicago, Chicago, IL
Lauren Bishop, MPH, Health Sciences Department, NORC at the University of Chicago, Bethesda, MA
Jennifer Titus, MPH, Health Sciences Department, NORC at the University of Chicago, Chicago, IL
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

Learning Areas:

Epidemiology
Public health or related research

Learning Objectives:
Identify operational strategies to maximize retention of participants who relocate in longitudinal studies of maternal and child health.

Keyword(s): Data Collection and Surveillance, Residential Mobility

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Qualified on the content I am responsible for because: I have spent the past 2.5 years as Movers Operational Lead for NORC’s work on the National Children’s Study (NCS). I played a key role in developing and implementing the operational strategies used to identify and retain relocated participants and the process used to transfer their data. Additionally, I served as liaison between the field interviewers, the data team, and our Information Management System leads to ensure data quality when transferring data for relocated participants.
Any relevant financial relationships? No

I agree to comply with the American Public Health Association Conflict of Interest and Commercial Support Guidelines, and to disclose to the participants any off-label or experimental uses of a commercial product or service discussed in my presentation.

Back to: 4382.0: Data & Epi Poster Session