OBJECTIVE Ideally, life course data are collected prospectively through an ongoing longitudinal study. We report adaptive multimethod fieldwork procedures that gathered life history data by mail survey and telephone interview, comparable with the face-to-face methods employed in the English Longitudinal Study on Ageing (ELSA). DESIGN The Australian Life Histories and Health (LHH) Survey was a...

The last 50 years have seen a gradual replacement of face-to-face interviewing with telephone interviewing as the dominant mode of survey data collection in the United States. But some of the most expensive and large-scale nationally funded, long-term survey research projects involving national area-probability samples and long questionnaires retain face-to-face interviewing as their mode. In t...

BACKGROUND Emerging communication technologies have had an impact on population-based telephone surveys worldwide. Our objective was to examine the potential biases of health estimates in South Australia, a state of Australia, obtained via current landline telephone survey methodologies and to report on the impact of mobile-only household on household surveys. METHODS Data from an annual mult...

BACKGROUND Effective strategies for contacting and recruiting study participants are critical in conducting clinical research. In this study, we conducted two sequential randomized controlled trials of mail- and telephone-based strategies for contacting and recruiting participants, and evaluated participant-related variables' association with time to survey completion and survey completion rate...

This study explored the diversity of emergency code telephone numbers currently in use in Australian hospitals and examined the feasibility of a standard emergency code telephone number for all Australian hospitals, based on the United Kingdom experience. An email and telephone convenience survey of Australian hospitals from six states and two territories was conducted. Of the 108 hospitals sur...

This study assesses the measurement properties of Ryff's scale of Psychological Well-Being (PWB) -a widely-used scale designed to measure six dimensions of PWB. Analyses of self-administered PWB data from three major surveys – Midlife in the United States (MIDUS), National Survey of Families and Households II (NSFH II), and the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (WLS) yielded very high overlap among ...

OBJECTIVES This pilot test assessed the feasibility of a cost effective population based approach to STI monitoring using automated telephone interviews, urine specimen collection kits sent out and returned by US Postal Service mail, and monetary incentives to motivate participation. METHODS 100 residents of Baltimore, MD, USA, completed an automated telephone survey and agreed to mail in a u...