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

Monnat Shannon M. () and Elo Irma T. ()
Additional contact information
Monnat Shannon M.: Lerner Chair for Public Health Promotion and Lerner Center Director, Associate Professor of Sociology, Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University, 426 Eggers Hall, Syracuse, NY 13244, USA
Elo Irma T.: Professor and Chair of Sociology and Chair of the Graduate Group in Demography, University of Pennsylvania, 229 McNeil Building, Philadelphia, PA, USA

Forum for Health Economics & Policy, 2022, vol. 25, issue 1-2, 57-84

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.

Keywords: Health and Retirement Study; mortality; health disparities (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1515/fhep-2021-0058 (text/html)
For access to full text, subscription to the journal or payment for the individual article is required.

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:bpj:fhecpo:v:25:y:2022:i:1-2:p:57-84:n:2

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/fhep/html

DOI: 10.1515/fhep-2021-0058

Access Statistics for this article

Forum for Health Economics & Policy is currently edited by Dana Goldman

More articles in Forum for Health Economics & Policy from De Gruyter
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().