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Influences on participation rate in a national Norwegian child development screening questionnaire study
1Institute of Psychology, University of Oslo, and Regional Center for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Regions East/South, Oslo, Norway. harald.janson@psykologi.uio.no
Aim:
To describe the influence of demographic variables on participation rate in a child development screening questionnaire study, and to discuss the implications for data analysis and for the design of future similar studies.
Methods:
Appropriate Ages and Stages Questionnaires were mailed to 2392 mothers of children aged 4-60 mo. The bivariate and multivariate influence of demographic variables on responding was investigated.
Results:
The response rate decreased roughly linearly with the age of the child (ranging from 76% at 8 mo to 32% at 60 mo). Mother's educational level, civil status and (marginally) child's gender also contributed independently to the prediction of response.
Conclusion:
Participation rate may be interpreted in terms of interest/saliency and time demands, if a mother's interest in her baby's normative development is assumed to be great, though decreasing as the child grows. Weighting for demographic variables seems to be a viable procedure in the present project; future studies may consider measures to increase the immediacy of questionnaire completion for mothers of children aged 3 y and older.