Interviewers' and respondents' effects on self-reported alcohol consumption in a Swiss health survey

Details

Serval ID
serval:BIB_A62739A2742A
Type
Article: article from journal or magazin.
Collection
Publications
Title
Interviewers' and respondents' effects on self-reported alcohol consumption in a Swiss health survey
Journal
Journal of Studies on Alcohol
Author(s)
Heeb  J. L., Gmel  G.
ISSN
0096-882X (Print)
Publication state
Published
Issued date
07/2001
Volume
62
Number
4
Pages
434-42
Notes
Clinical Trial
Journal Article
Randomized Controlled Trial
Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't --- Old month value: Jul
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: Characteristics of interviewers and respondents have been shown to influence the quality of data from survey research in various domains. There is little evidence for such effects in alcohol research, however. The purpose of the study reported here was to examine effects of gender and age of interviewers and respondents simultaneously This was done using hierarchical linear modeling, the advantage of which is that it can account for the clustering effects of respondents being nested within interviewers. METHOD: Data were obtained from the first wave of an ongoing randomized longitudinal study on changes in alcohol consumption in Switzerland. The response rate was 77.9%. Analyses were based on 2,746 (1,749 male) subjects with an average of at least monthly consumption in the 6 months before the telephone interview. Consumption was assessed by means of a graduated frequency measure. Five different hierarchical linear models of increasing complexity were used to test several hypotheses of interviewer and respondent effects. Findings from hierarchical linear modeling were compared with those from "classical" analysis of variance. RESULTS: A theoretical design effect of 1.89 attributable to interviewers was found. Both analyses of variance and hierarchical linear modeling provide support for a structure with a main effect for gender of respondents, as well as a main effect for age of respondents and an interaction effect between interviewers' and respondents' ages. CONCLUSIONS: Interviewer effects affect the estimation of statistics in survey research and must be adjusted for either by means of multilevel analysis or by the use of specialized sample survey software.
Keywords
Adolescent Adult Alcohol Drinking/*epidemiology Analysis of Variance Effect Modifiers (Epidemiology) Female Follow-Up Studies *Health Surveys Humans Male Middle Aged Random Allocation *Self Assessment (Psychology) Sex Factors Sweden/epidemiology
Pubmed
Web of science
Create date
25/01/2008 17:15
Last modification date
20/08/2019 15:11
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