Enhancing the Utility of the Health and Retirement Study to Identify Drivers of Rising Mortality Rates in the United States

Shannon M Monnat

No njxu3, OSF Preprints from Center for Open Science

Abstract: A recent report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) highlights rising rates of working-age mortality in the United States, portending troubling population health trends for this group as they age. The Health and Retirement Study (HRS) is an invaluable resource for researchers studying health and aging dynamics among Americans ages 50 and above and has strong potential to be used by researchers to provide insights about the drivers of rising U.S. mortality rates. This paper assesses the strengths and limitations of HRS data for identifying drivers of rising mortality rates in the U.S. and provides recommendations to enhance the utility of the HRS in this regard. Among our many recommendations, we encourage the HRS to prioritize the following: link cause of death information to respondents; reduce the age of eligibility for inclusion in the sample; increase the rural sample size; enhance the existing HRS Contextual Data Resource by incorporating longitudinal measures of structural determinants of health; develop additional data linkages to capture residential settings and characteristics across the life course; and add measures that capture drug use, gun ownership, and social media use.

Date: 2022-04-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age, nep-dem and nep-hea
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://osf.io/download/626863aa5d02bc0abbecc584/

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:osf:osfxxx:njxu3

DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/njxu3

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in OSF Preprints from Center for Open Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by OSF ().