What Works? An Empirical Perspective on How to Retain Youth in Longitudinal Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) and Substance Risk Reduction Studies.

Background: Low retention rates are a problem for longitudinal studies involving adolescents, and this is particularly true for justice-involved youth.

Methods: This study evaluates (1) strategies used to retain high-risk adolescents participating in a longitudinal research project; (2) the extent to which retention efforts were different in a justice-involved versus a non-justice-involved (school-based) sample; and (3) differential characteristics of justice-involved versus school-based adolescents that might explain differences in retention difficulty.

Results: Compared with the school-based youth, justice-involved youth required significantly more phone calls to be successfully reached. Additionally, baseline substance use (alcohol and marijuana use frequency) was higher in the justice-involved sample and significantly related to retention difficulty.

Conclusions: High retention rates for justice-involved and substance-using youth are possible with focused efforts on frequent communication and effortful contact.