Since 1981, the Centers for Disease Control has collaborated with State health departments and the District of Columbia to conduct random digit-dialed telephone surveys of adults concerning their health practices and behaviors. This State-based surveillance system, which yields data needed in planning, initiating, and supporting health promotion and disease prevention programs, is described in ...

The quality of survey estimates depends on coverage of the target population, response rates, and measurement errors. Landline telephone surveys exclude households that do not have landline telephones including wireless-only households. Among children under 18 years of age, the prevalence of living in wireless-only households increased from 3.7% in 2003 (January-June) to 19% in 2008 (July-Decem...

Use of random-digit dialing (RDD) for conducting health surveys is increasingly problematic because of declining participation rates and eroding frame coverage. Alternative survey modes and sampling frames may improve response rates and increase the validity of survey estimates. In a 2005 pilot study conducted in six states as part of the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, the authors ...

As more types of media have entered peoples homes, surveys can be conducted in ever more ways. In the thirties and forties, going door to door, or mailing surveys out, were the only options. From the seventies onwards, phone interviews became a popular alternative, thanks to the near universal adoption of the telephone. And now, as the internet is ever more ubiquitous, web-surveys are becoming ...

BACKGROUND Telephone interviews have become established as an alternative to traditional mail surveys for collecting epidemiological data in public health research. However, the use of telephone and mail surveys raises the question of to what extent the results of different data collection methods deviate from one another. We therefore set out to study possible differences in using telephone an...