2017 Life History Mail Survey Residential History Detail Level Data

The 2017 Life History Mail Survey (LHMS) collects information on residential history, education history, and significant childhood and family events. The LHMS is part of the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), a longitudinal research initiative funded through a cooperative agreement between the National Institute on Aging (NIA) and the Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan.

The 2017 LHMS Residential History Detail Level Data combines cases from the 2017 Spring and Fall survey cohorts, fielded from June 2017 through June 2018. The combined file contains 31,875 residential address records from 4,722 unique respondents. Each respondent may have multiple address records representing reported residential history over time.

Records are organized by Household ID (HHID), Person Number (PN), and the questionnaire line number used by the respondent for the residential history question (ENTRY). A COHORT variable identifies whether the record came from the Spring or Fall 2017 cohort.

Researchers should be aware of an important difference between the 2015 and 2017 Residential History Detail files: unlike the 2015 detail file, the 2017 dataset does not include a residence end year variable. The end year was not collected in the 2017 Fall questionnaire and is therefore not included in the combined 2017 product.