Patterns of Biomarker Participation for Children in Wave 2 of the Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Survey
Narayan Sastry, University of Michigan
Bonnie Ghosh-Dastidar, RAND Corporation
The objective assessment of respondents’ health status in social science surveys has grown rapidly in the past several years. Rather than just asking respondents to report on their health status, many surveys now collect biomeasures or conduct assessments that allow diseases or conditions to be assessed directly. In this paper, we examine rates of respondent participation in the biomeasure collection for Wave 2 of the Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Survey (L.A.FANS-2). We examine overall rates of biomeasure participation, differences in participation rates by mode of collection (distinguishing between measures collected by interviewers, health technicians on a subsequent visit, and respondents themselves following the interview), and the relationship of demographic, socioeconomic, and health status to participation rates. We test several hypotheses related to biomeasure participation, including that they are related to cultural factors and acculturation, to child behavior and schooling achievement, and to the value of respondents’ time.
Presented in Session 122: Methodological Issues in Health and Mortality: Longitudinal studies