Background: Validated instruments collecting data on health-related resource use are lacking, but required, for example, to investigate predictors of healthcare use or for health economic evaluation. The objective of ...
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Background: Validated instruments collecting data on health-related resource use are lacking, but required, for example, to investigate predictors of healthcare use or for health economic evaluation. The objective of the study was to develop, test and refine a questionnaire collecting data on health-related resource use and expenditure in patients with diabetes. Methods: The questionnaire was tested in 43 patients with diabetes mellitus types 1 and 2 in Germany. Response behaviour suggestive of problems with questions (item non-response, request for clarification, comments, inadequate answer, "don't know") was systematically registered. Cognitive interviews focusing on information retrieval and comprehension problems were carried out. Results: Many participants had difficulties answering questions pertaining to frequency of visits to the general practitioner (26%), time spent receiving healthcare services (39%), regular medication currently taken (35%) and out of pocket expenditure on medication (42%). These difficulties seem to result mainly from poor memory. A number of comprehension problems were established and relevant questions were revised accordingly. Conclusion: The questionnaire on health-related resource use and expenditure for use in diabetes research in Germany was developed and refined after careful testing. Ideally, the questionnaire should be externally validated for different modes of administration and recall periods within a variety of populations.
Household surveys often require including proxy reporters to obtain information about other household members who cannot be interviewed. The participation of proxies can undermine survey data quality due to the fact t...
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Household surveys often require including proxy reporters to obtain information about other household members who cannot be interviewed. The participation of proxies can undermine survey data quality due to the fact that proxies must respond to questions thinking about other people. The objectives of the present study were to analyze the behaviour of proxy reporters and evaluate the convergence between the answers given by proxies and self-reporters by means of behaviour coding. This improves the evaluation of convergence, since only adequate (i.e., interpretable) answers given by both types of informant are taken into account. Responses to a disability questionnaire employed by an official statistical institute were analyzed. The questionnaire includes 11 questions about different limitations related to everyday activities. 16 self-reporter and 16 proxies formed 16 couples whose members lived together and supported a direct family relation. The results show a high percentage (52%) of convergence between both types of informant, although fluctuating across the questions and the couples. Proxies showed relatively more adequate behaviour during the interaction than self-reporters. From this we conclude that proxies can be considered at least as good informants as self-reporters from an interviewer-respondent interaction perspective. Future research should address the impact of proxy responses on survey validity.
Quantitative aspects of the study of animal and human behaviour are increasingly relevant to test hypotheses and find empirical support for them. At the same time, photo and video cameras can store a large number of v...
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Quantitative aspects of the study of animal and human behaviour are increasingly relevant to test hypotheses and find empirical support for them. At the same time, photo and video cameras can store a large number of video recordings and are often used to monitor the subjects remotely. Researchers frequently face the need to code considerable quantities of video recordings with relatively flexible software, often constrained by species-specific options or exact settings. BORIS is a free, open-source and multiplatform standalone program that allows a user-specific coding environment to be set for a computer-based review of previously recorded videos or live observations. Being open to user-specific settings, the program allows a project-based ethogram to be defined that can then be shared with collaborators, or can be imported or modified. Projects created in BORIS can include a list of observations, and each observation may include one or two videos (e.g. simultaneous screening of visual stimuli and the subject being tested;recordings from different sides of an aquarium). Once the user has set an ethogram, including state or point events or both, coding can be performed using previously assigned keys on the computer keyboard. BORIS allows definition of an unlimited number of events (states/point events) and subjects. Once the coding process is completed, the program can extract a time-budget or single or grouped observations automatically and present an at-a-glance summary of the main behavioural features. The observation data and time-budget analysis can be exported in many common formats (TSV, CSV, ODF, XLS, SQL and JSON). The observed events can be plotted and exported in various graphic formats (SVG, PNG, JPG, TIFF, EPS and PDF).
When developing household surveys, much emphasis is understandably placed on developing survey instruments that can elicit accurate and comparable responses. In order to ensure that carefully crafted questions are not...
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When developing household surveys, much emphasis is understandably placed on developing survey instruments that can elicit accurate and comparable responses. In order to ensure that carefully crafted questions are not undermined by 'interviewer effects', standardised interviewing tends to be utilised in preference to conversational techniques. However, by drawing on a behaviour coding analysis of survey paradata arising from the 2012 UK Poverty and Social Exclusion Survey we show that in practice standardised survey interviewing often involves extensive unscripted conversation between the interviewer and the respondent. Whilst these interactions can enhance response accuracy, cooperation and ethicality, unscripted conversations can also be problematic in terms of survey reliability and the ethical conduct of survey interviews, as well as raising more basic epistemological questions concerning the degree of standardisation typically assumed within survey research. We conclude that better training in conversational techniques is necessary, even when applying standardised interviewing methodologies. We also draw out some theoretical implications regarding the usefulness of the qualitative-quantitative dichotomy.
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