Despite concerns about nonresponse bias due to decreasing response rates, telephone surveys remain a viable option for conducting local population-based surveillance. However, this becomes problematic for urban populations, which typically have higher nonresponse rates. Unfortunately, traditional methods of evaluating nonresponse bias pose challenges for public health practitioners due to high ...

BACKGROUND Occupational skin disease caused by wet work is particularly common in employees in hairdressing salons. The objective of this paper was to determine the frequency of glove use for hair shampooing. METHODS Data on the usage of gloves for hair shampooing were collected by covert observations in four cross-sectional surveys of newly opened hairdressing salons located in Cologne. Meas...

INTRODUCTION There is little evidence on how primary care providers (PCPs) model their practices in Nova Scotia (NS), Canada, what services they offer or what accessibility is like for the average patient. This study will create a database of all family physicians and primary healthcare nurse practitioners in NS, including information about accessibility and the model of care in which they prac...

This study investigates a growing issue for hotels and consumers: pricing across distribution channels. Research suggests that hotels should drive consumers towards direct channels with lower operating costs and away from intermediaries, yet few studies have investigated pricing practices across the direct communication channels that hotels control. The results of two surveys of over 100 Swiss ...

Questionnaire surveys, while more economical, typically achieve poorer response rates than interview surveys. We used data from a national volunteer cohort of young adult twins, who were scheduled for assessment by questionnaire in 1989 and by interview in 1996-2000, to identify predictors of questionnaire non-response. Out of a total of 8536 twins, 5058 completed the questionnaire survey (59% ...

Using telephone surveys, we examined exposure to terror, coping, and mental health response in randomly selected Jewish-Israelis (n = 100) and Arab-Israelis (n = 100) living in five Israeli cities affected by terrorism. Jewish-Israelis and Arab-Israelis were randomly selected for study participation and completed telephone surveys in May 2002, following an extended string of terror attacks and ...

This study evaluated the process of recruiting women from a primary care physician network into a study of genetic counseling for breast cancer. It also investigated predictors of women's interest in participating in genetic counseling research. Women were recruited in three stages: (a) via an initial contact letter; (b) a telephone screening survey; and (c) a mailed baseline questionnaire. We ...

Within the framework of automatic analysis of spoken telephone surveys we propose a robust Speech Mining strategy that selects, from a large database of spoken messages, the ones likely to be correctly processed by the Automatic Speech Recognition and Classification processes. The problem considered in this paper is the analysis of messages uttered by the users of a telephone service in respons...

Objective: To assess the performance in the detection of cases of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and the spondyloarthropathies (SpA) of a questionnaire suitable for use in telephone surveys conducted by patient interviewers. Methods: A questionnaire was designed with reference to the signs, symptoms, and epidemiological criteria for RA (ACR 1987) and SpA (ESSG 1991). Three groups of respondents were...

BACKGROUND Population surveys are frequently used to assess prevalence, correlates and health benefits of physical activity. However, nonsampling errors, such as question order effects, in surveys may lead to imprecision in self reported physical activity. This study examined the impact of modified question order in a commonly used physical activity questionnaire on the prevalence of sufficient...