Mishra S I, Dooley D, Catalano R, Serxner S
Department of Medicine, University of California-Irvine 92717.
Am J Public Health. 1993 Jan;83(1):94-9. doi: 10.2105/ajph.83.1.94.
Little is known about the effect of noncompletion on telephone surveys of health issues. This paper identifies a little-studied source of noncompletion, passive refusal, and evaluates its contribution to noncompletion bias along with two other sources: noncooperation and noncontact. Passive refusals include respondents who repeatedly request callbacks and households where interviewers repeatedly encounter an answering machine.
Measures of noncompletion (noncooperation, passive refusal, and noncontact), demographic and socioeconomic characteristics, health risk factors, and indicators of health care access and health status were collected through the Orange County Health Surveys on 4893 respondents. The surveys sampled by random-digit dialing and interviewed by computer-assisted telephone.
Passive refusals have a substantial impact on completion rates and bias due to noncompletion. Commonly used definitions for completion rates may underestimate the bias due to noncompletion because they omit passive refusals. After we controlled for demographic and socioeconomic factors, few noncompletion biases appeared on selected health indicators.
These results suggest improved reporting of completion rates and support a multivariate framework for studying noncompletion in telephone health surveys.
关于未完成情况对健康问题电话调查的影响，人们了解甚少。本文确定了一个研究较少的未完成情况来源——被动拒绝，并评估了其对未完成偏差的影响，同时还评估了另外两个来源——不合作和无法联系。被动拒绝包括反复要求回访的受访者以及访员多次遇到答录机的家庭。
通过奥兰治县健康调查收集了4893名受访者的未完成情况（不合作、被动拒绝和无法联系）、人口统计学和社会经济特征、健康风险因素以及医疗保健可及性和健康状况指标。调查采用随机数字拨号抽样，并通过计算机辅助电话进行访谈。
被动拒绝对完成率和因未完成导致的偏差有重大影响。常用的完成率定义可能会低估因未完成导致的偏差，因为它们忽略了被动拒绝。在我们控制了人口统计学和社会经济因素后，选定的健康指标上几乎没有出现未完成偏差。
这些结果表明应改进完成率的报告，并支持在电话健康调查中研究未完成情况的多变量框架。
