Despite their many benefits, longitudinal studies are much less common than one-time data collection or pre-post intervention designs. One reason for their scarcity is that longitudinal studies introduce requirements and challenges that non-longitudinal studies do not. One of the biggest challenges is participant attrition. In order to help…

Mailing campaigns are a way to keep longitudinal survey respondents engaged. While mailings usually include a survey answer request, sometimes respondents are contacted between-waves to update contact information or simply to keep respondent contact. Research on the actual impact of these between-wave contacts on response rates is scarce. This…

The objective of this meta-epidemiological study was to explore the impact of attrition rates on treatment effect estimates in randomised trials of chronic inflammatory diseases (CID) treated with biological and targeted synthetic disease-modifying drugs. We sampled trials from Cochrane reviews. Attrition rates and primary endpoint results were…

Conducting research among hard-to-reach populations is a difficult endeavor because some of their characteristics are known to be associated with survey nonresponse and panel attrition. In the case of the Parchemins study, which followed undocumented migrants over their process of regularization and during the first years of regularized life in…

Developmental disabilities (DD) research has depended on volunteer and clinical samples, with limited racial/ethnic diversity. This study focused on improving diversity and retention in DD research. The sample included 225 parents with a child with DD and 4,002 parents without children with DD from diverse racial/ethnic groups, drawn from Midlife…

Preventing panel members from attriting is a fundamental challenge for panel surveys. Research has shown that response behavior in earlier waves (response or nonresponse) is a good predictor of panelists' response behavior in upcoming waves. However, response behavior can be described in greater detail by considering the time until the response is…

Background/Context: Attrition has been described as "the Achilles Heel of the randomized experiment" (Shadish et al., 1998 p.3). Attrition looms as a threat because it can undermine group equivalence, eroding the methodological strength at the heart of a randomized evaluation. In particular, attrition could result in unobserved…

This article analyzes whether response patterns in surveys differ between the general population, regular immigrants, and recent refugees. Analyses show that the address quality of refugees contacted in the first wave of a panel study is worse than that of the general population, but of a similar quality to that of other recent immigrants. Once…

The purpose of this study was to test a model for conceptualizing the socialization experiences of new professionals in student affairs, particularly in light of the high attrition rates commonly documented in the literature. Whereas past research has examined individuals as the locus of socialization, this study analyzed organizations as the…

Growth mixture models (GMMs) are a popular method to uncover heterogeneity in growth trajectories. Harnessing the power of GMMs in applications is difficult given the prevalence of nonconvergence when fitting GMMs to empirical data. GMMs are rooted in the random effect tradition and nonconvergence often leads researchers to modify their intended…

Attrition in longitudinal studies is a major threat to the representativeness of the data and the generalizability of the findings. Typical approaches to address systematic nonresponse are either expensive and unsatisfactory (e.g., oversampling) or rely on the unrealistic assumption of data missing at random (e.g., multiple imputation). Thus,…

Addressing factors that make it more likely for families to attrite from early intervention trials will allow researchers to ensure that families reap the full benefits of participation. This study was an analysis of 78 children (Mage = 18.38 months, SD = 5.78) at risk for autism participating in a university-based randomized controlled trial of…

This paper seeks to raise awareness among educational researchers and practitioners of some significant weaknesses and internal contradictions of randomised control trials (RCTs). Although critiques throughout the years from education scholars have pointed to the detrimental effects of this experimental approach on education practice and values,…

Considerable thought is often put into designing randomized control trials (RCTs). From power analyses and complex sampling designs implemented preintervention to nuanced quasi-experimental models used to estimate treatment effects postintervention, RCT design can be quite complicated. Yet when psychological constructs measured using survey scales…

Background: Randomised controlled trials (RCTs) have long been considered the gold standard in education research. Federal funds are allocated to evaluations that meet What Works Clearinghouse standards; RCT designs are required in order to meet these standards without reservations. Schools seek out interventions that are research based, in other…