Computer-assisted telephone interviewing (CATI): using the telephone for obtaining information on reproductive health Computer-assisted Telephone Interviewing (CATI): usando telefone para a obtenção de informações sobre saúde reprodutiva

The objective of this study was to evaluate the feasibility of using computer assisted telephone interviewing (CATI) as a method for obtaining information on reproductive health in Brazil. A total of 998 eligible women for the study were selected to answer a questionnaire through computerassisted telephone interviewing undertaken by trained interviewers. The outcomes of each telephone contact attempt were described. Differences between groups were assessed using the χ2 test. Phone contact was made in 60.3% of the attempts and 57.5% of the interviews were completed. The success rate improved with the decrease in time from hospitalization to interview and with the higher numbers of telephones available. A total of 2,170 calls were made, comprising of one to sixteen attempts per woman. The majority of situations where extra calls were necessary were due to the number being busy or to the fact that the woman was not available at the time of the call. CATI can prove be a valuable procedure for obtaining information on reproductive health among Brazilian women, particularly for relatively recent events and when more than one alternative telephone number is available. Interviews; Telephone; Reproductive Medicine Background In the past, much demographic and health research was carried out on a one-to-one basis resulting in a heavy work effort and high costs. Since the beginning of the last century, the telephone has been increasingly used for research purposes and this research method has been subject to a number of improvements resulting in cost reduction benefits. The development of computer-assisted telephone interviewing (CATI) with a structured and digitally-recorded questionnaire also allows the interviewer to take better custody of the interview. Telephone interviewing has now become a common method in health research 1,2. Recent research carried out by an Australian group compared recall of parents’ highest level of education in telephone and face-to-face surveys and concluded that the survey mode did not appear to influence the results 3. Other studies have investigated the concordance between telephone and face-to-face interviewing for obtaining information on psychiatric disorders and, although the authors found that telephone interviewing generally showed a good level of agreement with face-to-face clinical interviews, there can be a discordance between the methods, as the telephone method can even underor over-estimate the diagnostic relative to clinical face-to-face interview 4,5. Nevertheless, there are consistent data on similarities of answers obtained by teleARTIGO ARTICLE Cecatti JG et al. 1802 Cad. Saúde Pública, Rio de Janeiro, 27(9):1801-1808, set, 2011 phone and face-to-face interview, which encourage the use of the telephone method 6. One problem of telephone interviews for population surveys is the possibility of selection bias in countries with poor telephone coverage 7,8,9. In such a context, it is even more difficult to use telephone based research. However, since 2003 there has been an unprecedented access to communications and most of the growth has taken place in the developing world due to mobile phone usage 10. In 2008 mobile telephone has achieved the status of a universal technology with four billion subscribers (against 1.3 billion home line telephones). Most of the increase occurred in developing countries which helped to bridge regional divides between urban centers and rural peripheries and reduce the gap in communication technology between high and low income countries 10. In fact, in the recent past, until 2001 Brazil’s rate of households with a landline telephone was only 28%, and 59% of households had at least one telephone available 11. More recently, Brazil reached a penetration rate of 78.5 telephones per 100 in 2008. Those numbers show that it is potentially feasible to carry out this kind of study in middle income countries 12,13. Therefore, the use of this method in population surveys on maternal health is an alternative to reach broader populations. In maternal health research, the study of maternal morbidity could then theoretically be improved by telephone surveys in such settings. However, there are two different situations concerning the use of telephones in research: when using a probabilistic sample of households with landline or mobile telephones to find somebody with certain characteristics and when tracing a specific subject selected from a database. The present study addresses information on the feasibility of tracing by telephone women admitted in a tertiary hospital in a developing setting with the purpose of obtaining information on reproductive health.