Is there any published evidence regarding the effectiveness of postal versus telephone recruitment into non-CTIMP mental health randomised controlled trials? Currently NRES ethics committees require written information to be provided (usually via postal methods) to potential participants. However, this often results in a poor response rate since it relies on a number of factors, for example, successful delivery; unsolicited mail being opened; the contents being read; the contents being understood/literacy levels etc. Studies are increasingly using additional 'top-up' methods (e.g., clinical studies officers phoning up non-responders) to increase recruitment.
I would be interested to hear of other researchers' experiences in this area - and particularly to find out if anything has been published in the area.
Many thanks, Claire
Actually each method has its pros and cons. Postal method, I have used it in USA, although they have excellent mailing system but the response rate in its best circumstances will not reach 50%. On the other hand, telephone sampling has some limitations such as calling in suitalbe time for the sample. My suggestion, is to use both, and to start with mailing and to ask participants for their convenient time to be called. Also, you may add the email system for interaction. Hope this was helpfull somehow. good luck
Claire -
In 1999 I attended and presented at the International Conference on Survey Nonresponse (link to abstract file attached), and I recall that someone from the Netherlands said that they had inundated their population with so many surveys, that their response rates were always low. That is likely a problem that we all share now. I think that surveys are often too long and intrude on people (especially when they can not always tell a legitimate survey from a marketing device). So you have your work cut out for you whenever you do a public survey now on anything.
But if you want to try different modes, there was a relatively recent conference in Europe on that, I think, and you may be able to find authors from that.
I worked at the US Energy Information Administration until last August, and a question of changing data collection modes on an energy consumption survey came up. We were told that there were some complex methods/models to look into that, but I did not think they would have the data to support it. I worked in establishment surveys, but did come up with a simple method for looking at mode change for that consumption survey. Notes on that are attached through the second link below, if that might be of any help here.
Hope this somewhat related to your issues.
Cheers - Jim
http://www.amstat.org/sections/srms/jsmprg/icsn.pdf
Technical Report A Note on Estimating Impact of Data Collection Mode Change f...
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