Transitioning an In-Person Survey of Older Adults to Multimode Data Collection

ObjectivesThe first 3 rounds of the National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project (NSHAP) were in-person. Preparing for Round Four (R4), NSHAP began developing ways to collect complex questionnaire and biomeasure data remotely. R4 was scheduled to begin in 2020, but due to the coronavirus pandemic, NSHAP delayed R4 data collection and instead conducted a study on respondents’ experiences during the pandemic, as well as pretests to strengthen NSHAP’s remote data collection capability. This paper describes the methodology, results, and lessons learned from these efforts, which were undertaken as a bridge between NSHAP’s all-in-person past and multimode future.MethodsThe coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) Study was a multimode survey of NSHAP respondents to assess the impact of the pandemic. The multimode approach allowed evaluation of the feasibility of using different modes of data collection with older adults. NSHAP adapted its in-person questionnaire for phone and web administration and conducted pretests of the full phone questionnaire and sections of the web questionnaire. The project developed and tested a “BioBox,” a kit containing all the supplies and instructions for respondents to self-collect biomeasures remotely. The BioBox was tested through an in-lab and in-home pilot, followed by 2 larger-scale pretests.ResultsThe COVID-19 Study and pretests achieved NSHAP respondent participation in remote questionnaire and biomeasure collection, despite being accustomed to fully in-person data collection.DiscussionOur findings and experiences will inform the collection of NSHAP data in future rounds and could inform other panel studies of older adults considering multimode data collection.