This is the researcher website for the Health and Retirement Study, a major national panel study of the lives of older Americans. If you are a study participant, please view the participant website.
HRS began with a uniquely multi-disciplinary approach focused on four broad topic areas— income and wealth, health and use of health services, work and retirement, and family connections—which remain at the study’s core. Further expansion into psychosocial functioning provides unprecedented potential to study increasingly complex questions about aging and retirement. HRS now collects a wide range of measures of physical function, blood samples for blood-based biomarkers, and saliva for DNA samples. Integrating biology in this way puts HRS at the forefront of biosocial surveys of aging. In depth measurement of cognition through the Harmonized Cognitive Assessment Protocol provides assessment of Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias.
For consenting respondents, HRS data are linked at the individual level to administrative records from Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid claims, Veteran’s Affairs, the National Death Index, and a wide range of other contextual information about the environments of participants, providing a wealth of detail beyond what the survey can achieve.
Aging is a global phenomenon. Because of its innovation and importance, the HRS has become the model for a growing network of harmonized longitudinal aging studies around the world.
This page will point you to several additional resources on the website to help you get started:
-
The Health and Retirement Study: An Introduction — A short video introduction to the HRS.
-
Using HRS Data: A Guide for New Users – A broad introductory guide to the full survey content and study design that also provides statistical code for basic data management and analysis, including application of survey weights.
-
The HRS Cohort Profile paper – A broad overview of the HRS through 2014, published in the International Journal of Epidemiology.
-
Aging in the 21st Century — A publication that describes some of the major themes and findings from the study through 2016.
Documentation
Information for all publicly released HRS data products is available in the Documentation section. This includes questionnaires, data descriptions, codebooks, and other items of interest. HRS co-investigators and staff members have created a series of User Guides designed to provide additional information on the content areas of the survey and linked data.
Data Products
The Data Products section contains listings of available data products. The RAND HRS Data Products are user-friendly versions of much of the HRS public data created under subcontract from the HRS to researchers at the RAND Center for the Study of Aging. The RAND HRS Longitudinal File is an especially useful place for new users to get started using HRS data.
HRS has always been committed to early and open access to data while protecting the confidentiality of respondents. Public Data is available to all registered users. Use of Sensitive Health Data requires the completion of an additional order form. Use of Restricted Data requires a detailed application.
Media & Publications
The data are widely used by scientists and policy analysts worldwide. You can access the rapidly growing bibliographic database of publications that use HRS data on the HRS Media & Publications page.
More Help
If you have questions, concerns, or comments, please email [email protected]. Sign up for the user newsletter to get information about training opportunities and other news about the study.