Participation rates for epidemiologic studies have been declining during the past 30 years with even steeper declines in recent years. This wholesale decrease in participation rate, or at the very least the increase in refusal, has, quite understandably, occasioned some concern among epidemiologists who have long considered a high study participation rate as one of the hallmarks of a "good" epi...

The aim of this article is to understand the reasons for attending a chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD)-specific self-management (SM) programme and how attendance at such programmes might be improved. A total of 20 qualitative semistructured interviews were carried out with patients and with lay programme tutors involved in the Better Living with Long term Airways disease (BELLA) pilo...

User participation in IS development has become an established practice perceived to improve both the development process and its outcomes. Recently, however, Markus and Mao (2004) have highlighted the need to revisit user participation in light of the changing IS development environment. A survey of New Zealand organisations with 200 or more full-time employees was undertaken in order to obtai...

MyUniversity is a European project to foster the eParticipation in European higher education institutions and allow their members to influence the final decision making performed by the institutions’ authorities. A framework, composed of the two existing interactive tools Gov2Demoss and Pnyx.eVoting, and a methodology to manage eParticipation initiatives have been created for this purpose. This...

This study reports the impact of high sensitivity to early exchange in 11-grade, CSCL triads solving welland ill-structured problems in Newtonian Kinematics. Analysis of the evolution of participation inequity (PI) in group discussions suggested that participation levels tended to get locked-in relatively early on in the discussion. Similarly, high (low) quality member contributions made earlie...

BACKGROUND/OBJECTIVES Falls are a major public health problem. Older persons are frequently underrepresented in trials, including falls prevention trials. Insight into possible reasons for non-participation could help to improve trial designs and participation rates among this age-group. The aim of this study was to explore reasons why older people refuse to participate in falls prevention tria...