In the decades to come, the aging of the baby boomers will lead to the greying of the U.S. workforce: by 2005, the mean age of the workforce will have increased by five years. In order to maintain productivity, there will be a need to ask more from older workers. However, there are already data which suggest that older workers are at increased risk for serious occupational injuries. As the workforce ages in the beginning of the 21st century, the problem of occupational injuries among older workers will loom increasingly large. The Health and Retirement Study (HRS) is a longitudinal study of a representative cohort of 12,654 Americans between the ages of 51 and 61 years. Enriched for African-Americans and Hispanics, the study aims to provide policy makers with information about the changes in retirement and disability patterns and to provide the scientific community with data needed to generate more accurate models of the retirement process. To accomplish these goals, the HRS will use personal and telephone interviews to collect a rich and varied dataset on each participant over the next 20 years including work status; demographic; health variables such as physical function, subjective global ratings, effective and cognitive function, smoking and alcohol consumption; and job related characteristics such as industry, occupation and job satisfaction. Here, the investigator proposes a secondary analysis of the HRS data concerning occupational injury in the first two interviews (1992 and 1994).
He aims to evaluate the validity of self-reported occupational injuries in the 1992 interviews; to model occupational injuries among older workers using 1992 data; to assess the stability of risk factors for occupational injury among older workers by comparing the HRS 1992 data with 1994 data; and to use the 1994 HRS occupational injury data to carryout a prospective validation of the multivariate model developed on the cross-sectional data of 1992. The results of these studies can be expected to lead to new prevention strategies for occupational injuries among older workers.
