Modelling non-response in the National Child Development Study

There is widespread concern that the cumulative effects of the non-response that is bound to affect any long-running longitudinal study will lead to mistaken inferences about change. We focus on the National Child Development Study and show how non-response has accumulated over time. We distinguish between attrition and wave non-response and show how these two kinds of non-response can be related to a set of explanatory variables. We model the discrete time hazard of non-response and also fit a set of multinomial logistic regressions to the probabilities of different kinds of non-response at a particular sweep. We find that the best predictors of non-response at any sweep are generally variables that are measured at the previous sweep but, although non-response is systematic, much of the variation in it remains unexplained by our models. We consider the implications of our results for both design and analysis. Copyright 2006 Royal Statistical Society.