Constructing a Work History Dataset of Jobs Held During Early and Middle Adulthood Using the Health and Retirement Study

The Health and Retirement Survey (HRS) (https://hrs.isr.umich.edu/about) collects
extensive data on current employment and occupation at each wave but data on occupations
prior to the start of the survey are limited to an abbreviated job history in each respondent's
first interview focused on recently held jobs. Therefore, using HRS data to link employment
earlier in respondents' lives to socioeconomic, health, and other outcomes at older ages has
been infeasible. The RAND Corporation created a dataset from the HRS Core and Exit
Interviews called the RAND HRS Cross-Year Longitudinal file which is used by many
researchers working with HRS. This dataset contains a variable called the "longest job held"
for each respondent. However, this variable is the longest job held among the limited subset of
jobs reported in HRS (most of which are recent) and not necessarily the longest job that the
respondent has held to date.
In 2017, HRS conducted a Life History Mail Survey (LHMS) of HRS respondents who
had participated in the 2016 Core interview. The LHMS was conducted in three parts which,
combined, include all of the 2016 Core interview respondents. The LHMS questionnaire was a
pencil-paper survey completed and returned by respondents and included a grid asking