BMJ  2005;331:1082-1083 (5 November), doi:10.1136/bmj.331.7524.1082-c

Letter

Are consenters representative of a target population?

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

EDITOR—I write with reference to the paper by Junghans et al on recruiting patients to medical research.¹ We recently published a method to determine if consenters to population surveys are representative of the target study population.²

Recently introduced data protection legislation has changed research practice in the United Kingdom, although uncertainties about the interpretation of the legislation remain.³ Methods such as searching general practice records to investigate whether non-responders are different to responders are no longer acceptable as they use information about identifiable individuals without their consent. An alternative approach to estimating the effect of non-response is to reformulate the problem as the extent to which responders are representative of the total target population. Since anonymised data may be obtained and used for the target population as a whole, this represents an indirect way of assessing the impact of non-response on representativeness. We compared consultation rates for some . . . [Full text of this article]

Leek Health Centre, Fountain Street, Leek ST13 6JB david.millson@tiscali.co.uk

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