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Abstract Background Participation in epidemiologic studies has been declining over the last decades. In addition to postal invitations and phone calls, home visits can be conducted to increase participation. The aim of this study was therefore to evaluate the effects of home visits in terms of response increase and composition of the additionally recruited and final sample. Methods In the framework of the German National Cohort (NAKO) recruitment process, two of 18 study centers, Halle (Saale) and Berlin-Center, performed home visits as additional recruitment step after postal invitation and reminders. Response increase was calculated and differences between participants recruited via home visits and standard recruitment were examined. Proportions are presented as percentages with 95%-confidence intervals. Results In the general population in Halle, 21.3-22.8% participated after postal invitation and two reminders in the five assessed recruitment waves. The increase of the overall response was 2.8 percentage points (95%confidence interval: 1.9-4.0) for home visits compared to 2.4 percentage points (95%CI: 1.7-3.3) for alternatively sent third postal reminder. Participants recruited via home visits had similar characteristics to those recruited via standard recruitment. Among persons of Turkish descent in Berlin-Center site of the NAKO, home visits conducted by native speakers increased the participation of women, persons living together with their partner, were born in Turkey, had lower German language skills, lower-income, lower education, were more often smokers and reported more often diabetes and depression to a degree which changed overall estimates for this subsample. Conclusions As an additional recruitment measure in the general population, home visits increased response only marginally, and the through home visits recruited participants did not differ from those already recruited. Among persons with migration background, home visits by a native speaker increased participation of persons not reached by the standard recruitment, but the effects of using a native speaker approach could not be separated from the effect of home visits.

Background: Participation in epidemiologic studies has been declining over the last decades. In addition to postal invitations and phone calls, home visits can be conducted to increase participation. The aim of this study was therefore to evaluate the effects of home visits in terms of response increase and composition of the additionally recruited and final sample.Methods: In the framework of the German National Cohort (NAKO) recruitment process, two of 18 study centers, Halle (Saale) and Berlin-Center, performed home visits as additional recruitment step after postal invitation and reminders. Response increase was calculated and differences between participants recruited via home visits and standard recruitment were examined. Proportions are presented as percentages with 95%-confidence intervals.Results: In the general population in Halle, 21.3-22.8% participated after postal invitation and two reminders in the five assessed recruitment waves. The increase of the overall response was 2.8 percentage points (95%confidence interval: 1.9-4.0) for home visits compared to 2.4 percentage points (95%CI: 1.7-3.3) for alternatively sent third postal reminder. Participants recruited via home visits had similar characteristics to those recruited via standard recruitment. Among persons of Turkish descent in Berlin-Center site of the NAKO, home visits conducted by native speakers increased the participation of women, persons living together with their partner, were born in Turkey, had lower German language skills, lower-income, lower education, were more often smokers and reported more often diabetes and depression to a degree which changed overall estimates for this subsample.Conclusions: As an additional recruitment measure in the general population, home visits increased response only marginally, and the through home visits recruited participants did not differ from those already recruited. Among persons with migration background, home visits by a native speaker increased participation of persons not reached by the standard recruitment, but the effects of using a native speaker approach could not be separated from the effect of home visits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The cost of interviewer-administered data collection (CAPI, CATI) has been gradually rising, while response rates have been declining over time. This situation has led to the domination of online data collection (CAWI), which tends to suffer from poor population coverage and even lower response rates. This could be overcome by combining this method with another mode of data collection. This paper aims to summarise the main principles of mixed-mode design, its implementation in major international surveys, and the first results of a project testing the feasibility of the push-to-web mixed-mode design in the Czech context. The results illustrate that together, unequal distribution of technological skills and willingness to participate distort the recruitment of random samples for CAWI towards middle-aged and more educated respondents. The mixed-mode design – together with the described components – has the potential to better involve underrepresented groups, while it is essential to follow the rules for achieving comparable answers across modes and devices. Finally, we emphasize the need to disseminate findings to researchers and other users of survey data, as the use of mixed-mode design has been rapidly increasing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Sequential mixed-mode surveys using both web-based surveys and telephone interviews are increasingly being used in observational studies and have been shown to have many benefits; however, the application of this survey design has not been evaluated in the context of epidemiological case-control studies., Objective: In this paper, we discuss the challenges, benefits, and limitations of using a sequential mixed-mode survey design for a case-control study assessing risk factors during the COVID-19 pandemic., Methods: Colorado adults testing positive for SARS-CoV-2 were randomly selected and matched to those with a negative SARS-CoV-2 test result from March to April 2021. Participants were first contacted by SMS text message to complete a self-administered web-based survey asking about community exposures and behaviors. Those who did not respond were contacted for a telephone interview. We evaluated the representativeness of survey participants to sample populations and compared sociodemographic characteristics, participant responses, and time and resource requirements by survey mode using descriptive statistics and logistic regression models., Results: Of enrolled case and control participants, most were interviewed by telephone (308/537, 57.4% and 342/648, 52.8%, respectively), with overall enrollment more than doubling after interviewers called nonresponders. Participants identifying as female or White non-Hispanic, residing in urban areas, and not working outside the home were more likely to complete the web-based survey. Telephone participants were more likely than web-based participants to be aged 18-39 years or 60 years and older and reside in areas with lower levels of education, more linguistic isolation, lower income, and more people of color. While there were statistically significant sociodemographic differences noted between web-based and telephone case and control participants and their respective sample pools, participants were more similar to sample pools when web-based and telephone responses were combined. Web-based participants were less likely to report close contact with an individual with COVID-19 (odds ratio [OR] 0.70, 95% CI 0.53-0.94) but more likely to report community exposures, including visiting a grocery store or retail shop (OR 1.55, 95% CI 1.13-2.12), restaurant or cafe or coffee shop (OR 1.52, 95% CI 1.20-1.92), attending a gathering (OR 1.69, 95% CI 1.34-2.15), or sport or sporting event (OR 1.05, 95% CI 1.05-1.88). The web-based survey required an average of 0.03 (SD 0) person-hours per enrolled participant and US $920 in resources, whereas the telephone interview required an average of 5.11 person-hours per enrolled participant and US $70,000 in interviewer wages., Conclusions: While we still encountered control recruitment challenges noted in other observational studies, the sequential mixed-mode design was an efficient method for recruiting a more representative group of participants for a case-control study with limited impact on data quality and should be considered during public health emergencies when timely and accurate exposure information is needed to inform control measures., (©Amanda D Tran, Alice E White, Michelle R Torok, Rachel H Jervis, Bernadette A Albanese, Elaine J Scallan Walter. Originally published in JMIR Formative Research (https://formative.jmir.org), 27.05.2024.)

Mixed mode designs are becoming standard in the collection of survey data. Despite this, there are still unknowns regarding how mode (e.g., Web) or mode design (e.g., sequential mixed mode) impacts measurement error. Previous research has been limited by the confounding of selection and measurement mode effects and the investigation of only one type of measurement error at a time. In this paper, we use three waves of the Understanding Society Innovation Panel to investigate whether single-mode versus sequential mixed-mode and Web versus face-to-face modes have different impacts on measurement error. We make use of a quasi-experimental design that randomly allocated respondents to either a unimode face-to-face interview or a sequential mixed-mode (Web and face-to-face) design. Through this design, we implement a new multitrait-multierror model that estimates social desirability, acquiescence, and method effects simultaneously. The results show no differences in measurement error between single modes and mode designs with respect to acquiescence and method effect but some differences are found for social desirability. We discuss the practical implications of these findings and their possible causes in conclusion.

This article outlines the main features of the European Values Study (EVS), with special focus on the innovations implemented in the fifth wave (2017). As a large-scale, cross-national and longitudinal social survey program, the EVS provides insights into the ideas, beliefs, preferences, attitudes, values, and opinions of citizens all over Europe, unique in its combined focus on how Europeans think about life, family, work, religion, politics, and society. The first round of data collection was initiated in 1981, and every nine years, a representative sample of residents have been questioned in an increasing number of countries (47 European countries/regions in 2008). The fifth wave started in 2017 and is at this moment under completion. The methodological standards of EVS increased over the waves. As part of the Horizon 2020 project Synergies for Europe's Research Infrastructures in the Social Sciences (SERISS), EVS took part in innovations in the field of translation and the implementation of websurveys. The data of the European Values Study are publicly available free of charge. A rich academic literature has accumulated around the original and consecutive surveys: more than 1600 publications are listed in the EVS Bibliography (see europeanvaluesstudy.eu). The final sections of this article describe more in detail the implementation of the EVS 2017 in the Netherlands and end with a peek in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a multi-domain design approach combining High Frequency (HF) and digital design. Simulated or measured S-parameters of a designed HF network are converted to a VHDL-AMS model, which can be combined with the digital part of the system in a RF-digital co-design environment. A chipless RFID system is studied as a case study. Comparing simulation results produced by ADS and AMS models validate capability of the proposed method. This method can be used to combine a variety of disciplines with HF design environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A general purpose Conic Section Function Neural Network (CSFNN) circuitry in Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) has been designed for an object recognition application. CSFNN is capable of making open and closed decision regions by combining the propagation rules of Radial Basis Functions (RBF) and Multilayer Perceptrons (MLP) on a single neural network with a unique propagation rule. Chip-in-the-loop learning technique was used during the training process. Utilizing mixed-mode hardware techniques, the inputs of the network and the feedforward signals are all analog while the control unit and storage of the network parameters are fully digital. CSFNN circuitry architecture is problem independent and consists of 16 inputs, 16 hidden layer neurons and 8 outputs. Inheriting the merits of CSFNN, the circuitry has good recognition performance on several objects with invariance to pose, lighting, and brightness. The designed hardware achieved a good recognition performance by means of both accuracy and computational time comparable to CSFNN software. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Retinomorphic chips may improve their spike-coding efficiency by emulating the primate retina's parallel pathways. To model the four predominant ganglion-cell types in the cat retina, I morphed outer and inner retina microcircuits into a silicon chip, Visio1. It has 104×96 photoreceptors, 4×52×48 ganglion-cells, a die size of 9.25×9.67 mm2 in 1.2 μm 5 V CMOS, and consumes 11.5 mW at 5 spikes/second/ganglion-cell. Visio1 includes novel subthreshold current-mode circuits that model horizontal-cell autofeedback, to decouple spatial filtering from local gain control, and model amacrine-cell loop-gain modulation, to adapt temporal filtering to motion. Different ganglion cells respond to motion in a quadrature sequence, making it possible to detect edges of one contrast or the other moving in one direction or the other. I present results from a multichip 2-D motion system, which implements Watson and Ahumada's model of human visual-motion sensing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]