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Strategies for achieving a high response rate in a home interview survey

BACKGROUND: Response rates in surveys have been falling over the last 20 years, leading to the need for novel approaches to enhance recruitment. This study describes strategies used to maximise recruitment to a home interview survey of mothers with young children living in areas of high deprivation....

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Autores principales: Kiezebrink, Kirsty, Crombie, Iain K, Irvine, Linda, Swanson, Vivien, Power, Kevin, Wrieden, Wendy L, Slane, Peter W
Formato: Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2009
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2709923/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19566931
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1471-2288-9-46
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author Kiezebrink, Kirsty
Crombie, Iain K
Irvine, Linda
Swanson, Vivien
Power, Kevin
Wrieden, Wendy L
Slane, Peter W
author_facet Kiezebrink, Kirsty
Crombie, Iain K
Irvine, Linda
Swanson, Vivien
Power, Kevin
Wrieden, Wendy L
Slane, Peter W
author_sort Kiezebrink, Kirsty
collection PubMed
description BACKGROUND: Response rates in surveys have been falling over the last 20 years, leading to the need for novel approaches to enhance recruitment. This study describes strategies used to maximise recruitment to a home interview survey of mothers with young children living in areas of high deprivation. METHODS: Mothers of two year old children received a letter from their GP inviting them to take part in a survey on diet. Participants were subsequently recruited by a researcher. The researcher first tried to contact potential participants by telephone, to discuss the study and make an appointment to conduct a home interview. Where telephone numbers for women could not be obtained from GP records, web searches of publicly available databases were conducted. After obtaining correct telephone numbers, up to six attempts were made to establish contact by telephone. If this was unsuccessful, a postal request for telephone contact was made. Where no telephone contact was achieved, the researcher sent up to two appointments by post to conduct a home interview. RESULTS: Participating GPs invited 372 women to take part in a home based interview study. GP practices provided telephone numbers for 162 women, of which 134 were valid numbers. The researcher identified a further 187 numbers from electronic directories. Further searches of GP records by practice staff yielded another 38 telephone numbers. Thus, telephone numbers were obtained for 99% of potential participants. The recruitment rate from telephone contacts was 77%. Most of the gain was achieved within four calls. For the remaining women, contact by post and home visits resulted in 18 further interviews, corresponding to 35% of the women not recruited by telephone. The final interview rate was 82%. This was possible because personal contact was established with 95% of potential participants. CONCLUSION: This study achieved a high response rate in a hard to reach group. This was mainly achieved by first establishing contact by telephone. The use of multiple sources identified the telephone numbers of almost all the sample. Multiple attempts at telephone contact followed by postal approaches led to a high home interview rate.
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spelling pubmed-27099232009-07-14 Strategies for achieving a high response rate in a home interview survey Kiezebrink, Kirsty Crombie, Iain K Irvine, Linda Swanson, Vivien Power, Kevin Wrieden, Wendy L Slane, Peter W BMC Med Res Methodol Research Article BACKGROUND: Response rates in surveys have been falling over the last 20 years, leading to the need for novel approaches to enhance recruitment. This study describes strategies used to maximise recruitment to a home interview survey of mothers with young children living in areas of high deprivation. METHODS: Mothers of two year old children received a letter from their GP inviting them to take part in a survey on diet. Participants were subsequently recruited by a researcher. The researcher first tried to contact potential participants by telephone, to discuss the study and make an appointment to conduct a home interview. Where telephone numbers for women could not be obtained from GP records, web searches of publicly available databases were conducted. After obtaining correct telephone numbers, up to six attempts were made to establish contact by telephone. If this was unsuccessful, a postal request for telephone contact was made. Where no telephone contact was achieved, the researcher sent up to two appointments by post to conduct a home interview. RESULTS: Participating GPs invited 372 women to take part in a home based interview study. GP practices provided telephone numbers for 162 women, of which 134 were valid numbers. The researcher identified a further 187 numbers from electronic directories. Further searches of GP records by practice staff yielded another 38 telephone numbers. Thus, telephone numbers were obtained for 99% of potential participants. The recruitment rate from telephone contacts was 77%. Most of the gain was achieved within four calls. For the remaining women, contact by post and home visits resulted in 18 further interviews, corresponding to 35% of the women not recruited by telephone. The final interview rate was 82%. This was possible because personal contact was established with 95% of potential participants. CONCLUSION: This study achieved a high response rate in a hard to reach group. This was mainly achieved by first establishing contact by telephone. The use of multiple sources identified the telephone numbers of almost all the sample. Multiple attempts at telephone contact followed by postal approaches led to a high home interview rate. BioMed Central 2009-06-30 /pmc/articles/PMC2709923/ /pubmed/19566931 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1471-2288-9-46 Text en Copyright ©2009 Kiezebrink et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0 This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Kiezebrink, Kirsty
Crombie, Iain K
Irvine, Linda
Swanson, Vivien
Power, Kevin
Wrieden, Wendy L
Slane, Peter W
Strategies for achieving a high response rate in a home interview survey
title Strategies for achieving a high response rate in a home interview survey
title_full Strategies for achieving a high response rate in a home interview survey
title_fullStr Strategies for achieving a high response rate in a home interview survey
title_full_unstemmed Strategies for achieving a high response rate in a home interview survey
title_short Strategies for achieving a high response rate in a home interview survey
title_sort strategies for achieving a high response rate in a home interview survey
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2709923/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19566931
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1471-2288-9-46
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