Every two years since 2004, Growing Up in Australia: The Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC) has conducted interviews with study families. Longitudinal studies offer a wealth of information for researchers and policy makers; however, their results can be limited through sample attrition. Yes, as good looking and intelligent as the LSAC team are, we are not immune to this issue and our respondents (particularly the K Cohort who were 14-15 years at the last wave in 2014) are starting to refuse our attention. This is disappointing but not unexpected, other longitudinal studies have found similar increases in refusal rates when children enter adulthood 1.
Two key sources of sample attrition in Longitudinal Surveys are (i) losing contact with respondents due to their mobility and (ii) not maintaining their engagement with the study over time.
Through contact with other longitudinal life course development studies it appears that there is no quick or simple solution to reducing sample attrition but there are plenty of innovative ideas that the LSAC team and other longitudinal studies are attempting.
Fortunately, in 2015, the LSAC team have had the opportunity to do some more exciting, investigative work to better understand the needs of our study participants. Our 2015 respondent engagement strategy included (i) a combined mail out and tracking exercise, (ii) qualitative research interviews with first time refusal families from Wave 6 of the study and (iii) interviews with respondents who agreed to talk to us about how best to engage respondents in the study.
To address the first source of attrition, the LSAC team regularly undertakes tracking activities to update respondents contact details. This presentation will discuss the 2015 tracking innovation.
In terms of the second source of attrition, we’ve tried giving respondents gift cards, study updates, groovy looking brochures and entering them into prize draws but you’ve got to keep reinvigorating things to stop the relationship from going stale. This presentation will describe our response rates across the waves, our research into international activities to maintain respondent engagement, the results of our interviews with engaged and disengaged participants and our plans for establishing a respondent engagement panel in 2016.

1 Cohort Profile: The ‘Children of the 90s’—the index offspring of the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children Int. J. Epidemiol. (2013) 42 (1): 111-127, April 16, 2012