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Background: In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, social science research has required recruiting many prospective participants. Many researchers have explicitly taken advantage of widespread public interest in COVID-19 to advertise their studies. Leveraging this interest, however, risks creating unrepresentative samples due to differential interest in the topic. In this study, we investigate the design of survey recruitment materials with respect to the views of resultant participants., Methods: Within a pan-Canadian survey (stratified random mail sampling, n = 1969), the design of recruitment invitations to prospective respondents was experimentally varied, with some prospective respondents receiving COVID-specific recruitment messages and others receiving more general recruitment messages (described as research about health and health policy). All respondents participated, however, in the same survey, allowing comparison of both demographic and attitudinal features between these groups., Results: Respondents recruited via COVID-19 specific postcards were more likely to agree that COVID-19 is serious and believe that they were likely to contract COVID-19 compared to non-COVID respondents (odds = 0.71, p = 0.04; odds = 0.74, p = 0.03 respectively; comparing health to COVID-19 framed respondents). COVID-19 specific respondents were more likely to disagree that the COVID-19 threat was exaggerated compared to the non-COVID survey respondents (odds = 1.44, p = 0.02)., Conclusions: COVID-19 recruitment framing garnered a higher response rate, as well as a sample with greater concern about coronavirus risks and impacts than respondents who received more neutrally framed recruitment materials., (© 2022. The Author(s).)

Objectives: In order to minimize acquiescence response set bias, it is often recommended that questionnaires measuring attitudes, behaviours or health states contain items worded positively and negatively. It has also been suggested that when measuring health status this approach means that both the negative and positive dimensions of health can be assessed. This study aimed at assessing the performance of negatively and positively worded items in questionnaires to measure child and parent perceptions of child oral health-related quality of life. Methods: Both the child and parent questionnaire included four pairs of items, one negatively worded and one positively worded, that assessed eating, appearance, oral self-care and self-confidence. The response format was a five-point Likert frequency scale with a ‘Don't know’ option. Prior to analysis, the positive items were reverse coded. The relative performance of the two sets of items was assessed by means of comparisons of the proportions with ‘Don't know’ responses or missing values, mean item scores and proportions with the two highest frequency codes. Kappa statistics and intraclass correlation coefficients were used to assess the agreement between the negative and reverse-coded positive items and scores and the agreement between child and parent pairs. Factor analysis was used to determine if the two sets of items were measuring the same underlying construct. Results: The study was completed by 91 Canadian children and 100 parents (91 child–parent pairs) recruited from clinics treating paediatric, orthodontic and oro-facial conditions. The positively worded items elicited substantially more ‘Don't know’ responses or missing values than the negatively worded items and failed to discriminate between groups. In addition, mean item scores and proportions with the highest frequency codes were substantially larger for reverse-coded positive than negative items. Agreement between pairs of items was slight. Child–parent agreement was substantial for a scale constructed from the negative items but only moderate for the positive items. Factor analysis revealed that the two sets of items loaded onto different factors. Conclusions: The performance of the positively worded items was unsatisfactory and their use in oral health-related quality of life indexes, either to reduce response set or assess positive oral health, is at best questionable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When old/new recognition memory is tested with equal numbers of studied and nonstudied items and no rewards or instructions that favour one response over the other, there is no obvious reason for response bias. In line with this, Canadian undergraduates have shown, on average, a neutral response bias when we tested them on recognition of common English words. By contrast, most subjects we have tested on recognition of richly detailed images have shown a conservative bias: they more often erred by missing a studied image than by judging a nonstudied image as studied. Here, in an effort to better understand these materials-based bias effects (MBBEs), we examined changes in hit and false alarm (FA) rates (and in sensitivity and bias) from the first to fourth quartile of a recognition memory test in eight experiments in which undergraduates studied words and/or images of paintings. Response bias for images tended to increase across quartiles, whereas bias for words showed no consistent pattern across quartiles. This pattern could be described as an increase in the MBBE over the course of the test, but the underlying patterns for hits and FAs are not easily reconciled with this interpretation. Hit rates decreased over the course of the test for both materials types, with that decline tending to be steeper for images than words. For words, FA rates tended to increase across quartiles, whereas for paintings FA rates did not increase across quartiles. We discuss implications of these findings for theoretical accounts of the MBBE., (© 2021. The Psychonomic Society, Inc.)

Research investigating self-assessed unmet need (SUN) has taken the reports from surveys as given and subsequently attempted to discover patterns in inequality of access to healthcare. This requires the yet untested assumption that, given a certain level of care and demand, the likelihood of reporting unmet need does not vary across socioeconomic/demographic status (SEDS), be satisfied. Using an administrative dataset spanning 2001 to 2011 comprised of sufferers of a set of conditions that suggest unmet need (n = 3300) we evaluate the proposition that, given health status and care received, the propensity to report unmet need does not vary along SEDS. The results are further validated using the Canadian Community Health Surveys between 2001 and 2013 (n = 237,483). We find that the assumption of independence between reporting SUN and SEDS is not satisfied. Many of the groups found to have less access in previous studies may simply be more prone to interpret/answer the survey questions about unmet need in a certain way. The results of this research suggest that, in its present incarnation, survey data on self-assessed unmet need does not accurately measure what much of the academic literature has assumed it does. • Questions about "self-assessed unmet need" have been used to understand inequity in healthcare. • Response bias could undermine the findings of past work. • We examine these biases using two different methods with Canadian data. • The biases identified weaken the conclusion of many studies using unmet need. • Researchers should be cautious when examining gaps across sex, racial identity, or income. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]