This Article Full Text (PDF) All Versions of this Article: 0049124109346163v1 38/2/287    most recent References Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Alert me to new issues of the journal Add to Saved Citations Download to citation manager Request Permissions Request Reprints Add to My Marked Citations Citing Articles Citing Articles via Scopus Google Scholar Articles by Snidero, S. Articles by Gregori, D. Social Bookmarking                         What's this?

Question Order and Interviewer Effects in CATI Scale-up Surveys

Department of Statistics and Applied Mathematics, University of Torino, Italy, S&A S.r.l. - Surveys & Analyses, Torino, Italy

Federica Zobec

S&A S.r.l. - Surveys & Analyses, Torino, Italy

Paola Berchialla

Department of Public Health and Microbiology, University of Torino, Italy

Roberto Corradetti

Department of Statistics and Applied Mathematics, University of Torino, Italy

Dario Gregori

Laboratory of Epidemiological Methods and Biostatistics, Department of Environmental Medicine and Public Health, University of Padova, dario.gregori{at}unipd.it

The scale-up estimator is a network-based estimator for the size of hidden or hard to count subpopulations. Several issues arise in the public health context when the aim is the estimation of injuries occurring in a certain population, where two common problems are present: (a) Small injuries are usually difficult to observe and rarely reported in the official data and (b) people are not always compliant in giving information about some specific injuries, in particular when children are involved. This study checked the methodological issues arising from using a computer-assisted telephone interview (CATI) survey using the scale-up methodology for detecting the number of injuries due to choking in children ages 0 to 14 in Italy. For this purpose, 1,000 CATI interviews were conducted during a week using a questionnaire based on 33 questions about populations of known size according to census data. Then, each respondent was asked about other questions related to the main target population (e.g., number of children known to suffer from a choking accident). A sensitivity analysis was conducted for estimating the effect of varying subpopulations, order of the questions, and interviewer effects on the resulting estimates. For the interviewer effect, no particular differences were observed in the overall estimates of injuries. The conclusion is the scale-up estimator in association with CATI methodology shows a high potential in the field of injury prevention, being accurate and robust, but particular attention should be given to the training of the interviewers to improve stability of the estimates.

Key Words: scale-up method • interviewer effect • question order • foreign body injuries • population size estimation

This version was published on November 1, 2009

Sociological Methods & Research, Vol. 38, No. 2, 287-305 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/0049124109346163


CiteULike    Complore    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter    What's this?