The Health and Retirement Study

The Health and Retirement Study (HRS), funded by the National Institute of Aging, is based at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research. Directors of the HRS have included founding director F. Thomas Juster, Robert J. Willis, and, currently, David R. Weir, all of University of Michigan. Its 14-person interdisciplinary team of coinvestigators includes economists, demographers, psychologists, epidemiologists, and health researchers. The interdisciplinary nature of the HRS was a major element of its inception and design, as an attempt to combat disciplinary fragmentation in the study of retirement (Juster & Suzman, 1995).

The “original HRS” was launched in 1992, targeting a nationally representative sample of Americans born between 1931 and 1941 (aged 51–61 years at the time). This study was repeated in 1994, 1996, and 1998 before merging with The Study of Assets and Health Dynamics Among the Oldest Old (AHEAD). The AHEAD study was launched in 1993 targeting a nationally representative sample of Americans born before 1923 (aged 70 or older at the time). This study was repeated in 1995 before being merged with the HRS in 1998. For both samples, married participants’ spouses were also interviewed, regardless of age. African American and Hispanic populations are oversampled, as are citizens of Florida. The HRS proper currently has 12 waves of data, collected biennially.

Since its commencement in 1992, several additional cohorts of participants have been introduced into the study. In 1998, the Children of Depression cohort (born 1924–1930) and War Baby cohort (born 1942–1947) were added. In 2004 and 2010, respectively, the Early Baby Boomer cohort (born 1948–1953) and Mid Baby Boomer cohort (born 1954–1959) were added. The Late Baby Boomer cohort (born 1960–1965) is scheduled to be added in 2016. Including these refresher cohorts, the sample represented in the HRS has more than 26,000 participants (for more details about sample sizes and response rates, see HRS, 2011).

Broadly, the HRS measures retirement, as well as its longitudinal antecedents and consequences, in a multifaceted way. The breadth of variables included in the HRS reflects its design influences by both social scientists and policy researchers. The major sections of the survey include demographics, physical health and functioning, housing and mobility, family structure, current and past jobs, work history, disability, retirement plans, cognition and expectations, net worth, income, insurance, widowhood, and event history since previous wave. Exit interviews are conducted with survivors when participants pass away. Additional experimental modules are included during each wave of data collection and administered to a small subset of participants. For example, recent (2014) experimental modules included traumatic brain injury history, time discounting, decision making, and health behaviors. The inclusion of spouse information allows for dyadic and household-level analyses.

The HRS data are freely available after completing a brief registration. However, a small subset of the data, such as Medicare claims records, is restricted. Access to restricted data requires researcher justification and a data protection plan to ensure data security. In addition to the data and documentation available on the HRS Web site (http://hrsonline.isr.umich.edu), user-friendly versions of HRS data are available from the RAND Corporation’s Center for the Study of Aging, whose extensive work with the HRS data has been funded by the National Institute on Aging and the Social Security Administration.

Features of the RAND HRS data files include combining across waves of data into a single file, renaming variables for consistency across waves, and imputations based on available data. The RAND Corporation also created the Gateway to Global Aging (www.g2aging.org), funded by the National Institute on Aging, and now administered by The Center for Global Aging Research, USC Davis School of Gerontology, and The Center for Economic and Social Research. This Web site provides harmonized versions of datasets for 11 international aging and retirement studies, allowing for cross-national comparisons. Brief overviews of the international family of HRS studies are available at http://www.g2aging.org/study_descriptions.pdf.