Increasing response rates to postal questionnaires

doi:10.1136/bmj.325.7361.444

BMJ 2002;325:444 ( 24 August )

Letters

Increasing response rates to postal questionnaires

Changing layout of questionnaires increases response rates

Effect of incentives on response rates must be considered

Changing layout of questionnaires increases response rates

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

EDITOR $---$ The systematic review by Edwards et al is helpful to those of us who routinely design and use questionnaires in ourresearch.¹ One area not covered by the review, which is important,is the quality of theresponse.

Response rates are clearly important, but the quality of the responses is also important in that returned questionnaires withsome questions either missing or incorrectly filled in will havethe same effect as a poor response. In a pilot study of questionnairesfor a trial among people with venous ulcers one of us (CPI) noticedthat many items on the SF12 were either missed or incorrectlycompleted. The questions that were missed were those within thestem and leaf format of the SF12; questions in a self containedformat were notmissed.

We therefore changed the layout of the questionnaire by altering all the stem and leaf questions to self . . . [Full text of this article]

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Increasing response rates to postal questionnaires: systematic review: Phil Edwards, Ian Roberts, Mike Clarke, Carolyn DiGuiseppi, Sarah Pratap, Reinhard Wentz, and Irene Kwan
BMJ 2002 324: 1183. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]