Johnson Timothy, Fendrich Michael
Survey Research Laboratory, Public Administration Program, College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs, University of Illinois at Chicago, IL 60607, USA.
Ann Epidemiol. 2005 May;15(5):381-9. doi: 10.1016/j.annepidem.2004.09.004.
Well-documented errors in the reporting of drug-related behaviors have been attributed to several sources. These include: 1) respondent difficulties in understanding survey questions, 2) problems in recalling the information necessary to accurately answer these questions, and 3) social pressures that discourage accurate reporting. We report covariance structure models designed to simultaneously evaluate each of these potential sources of error.
Data examined are from a community survey of 627 Chicago adults which collected drug use self reports (via ACASI technology), multiple biological samples (including hair, urine, and saliva) that permit self-report validation, and a series of probes designed to collect systematic information regarding respondent comprehension and memory difficulties and social desirability concerns. These three sets of information were employed to construct latent variable covariance structure models that enabled an evaluation of the effects of each potential source of reporting error on the quality of drug use reporting.
Social desirability concerns were predictive of discordant drug use reporting and drug use under-reporting. Memory difficulties were predictive of drug use over-reporting. Differences in the predictive power of these variables were found across race/ethnic groups.
Both memory difficulties and social desirability concerns are independent sources of measurement error in surveys of drug use epidemiology.
药物相关行为报告中记录详实的错误可归因于多个来源。这些来源包括：1）受访者理解调查问题存在困难；2）回忆准确回答这些问题所需信息存在问题；3）阻碍准确报告的社会压力。我们报告了旨在同时评估这些潜在误差来源的协方差结构模型。
所分析的数据来自对627名芝加哥成年人的社区调查，该调查收集了药物使用自我报告（通过计算机辅助自我访谈技术）、多种生物样本（包括头发、尿液和唾液，可用于自我报告验证）以及一系列旨在收集有关受访者理解和记忆困难以及社会期望顾虑的系统信息的探测问题。利用这三组信息构建潜在变量协方差结构模型，以评估每个潜在报告误差来源对药物使用报告质量的影响。
社会期望顾虑可预测不一致的药物使用报告和药物使用报告不足。记忆困难可预测药物使用报告过度。在不同种族/族裔群体中发现了这些变量预测能力的差异。
在药物使用流行病学调查中，记忆困难和社会期望顾虑都是测量误差的独立来源。
