Main Wave 11 fieldwork finished on 5th October and NatCen are cleaning the data. The final figures from Wave 11 are: 
-    5,120 total productive households
-    6,286 total productive core members
-    Just over 7,000 total productive individuals.

 

The Wave 11 health visit fieldwork will continue until the middle of November and the end-of-life fieldwork will continue until the end of October.

 

Sample types

There are three different household response sample types in wave 11 which had different response assumptions:

-    Existing sample members. These are people who took part in ELSA before in either one previous wave or many. We interviewed 4,318 households, and the response rate was 68%. 
-    Reissued refreshment sample. These were people who were unproductive in Wave 10 but were reissued in Wave 11. This proved worthwhile as we interviewed 25% of these households.
-    FRS refreshment. This is a new refreshment sample as previously people were recruited from the Health Survey for England. We issued just over 1,000 households and interviewed 476 which is 39%. We received the sample quite late in the fieldwork period and this has impacted the response rates. We will look at how to manage this better for the next wave.
-    Core members and partners. Total individuals interviewed is 7,847 including 1,445 partners. 
-    Ethnic minority boost sample. An additional 367 core members from non-white ethnic backgrounds in wave 11 were interviewed. The response figures for white British participants is not drastically different from minorities, which is good. It is lower for other ethnicity categories, which is quite an interesting finding especially in the FRS refreshment sample. The other ethnic group response was higher than white which is very encouraging and is what we wanted to achieve by using FRS for the refreshment sample. 

The health visits are still ongoing and a total of 3,825 households and 4,712 individuals have completed a health visit. Agreement to a biomedical field worker visit has been 86% at the main interview.