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Without perspectives of low-wage workers in studies of worker health and well-being, researchers cannot comprehensively assess occupational health and health equity impacts of workplace exposures and interventions. Researchers and practitioners have noted particular challenges in engaging low-wage workers in worksite-based health survey research, yet little scholarship has described strategies for improving their engagement and response rates. To fill this gap, we present case examples from 5 occupational studies conducted between 2020 and 2024 in industries including health care, food service, and fulfillment centers. For each case, we describe how we identified barriers to worker engagement in surveys, explain specific strategies we used to address those barriers, and assess the effectiveness of these actions. Then, summarizing across case examples, we offer practical recommendations to researchers surveying low-wage populations, highlighting that high-touch recruitment, building trust with workers and managers, and obtaining manager support to take surveys during work time (for worksite-based studies) are critical for obtaining reliable, representative data. Our work contributes to broader discussions on improving survey response rates in vulnerable worker populations and aims to support future researchers undertaking similar efforts. (Am J Public Health. 2025;115(2):201–208. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2024.307875) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Age and sex are known predictors of isometric shoulder strength and therefore must be accounted for when noting strength values or administering assessments such as the Constant Score. Given the popularity of the Constant Score, it is important to ensure protocols and values remain clinically relevant and are representative of the intended population. Method: Isometric shoulder strength was recorded for 511 participants without shoulder pathology using the ChatillonTM hand-held dynamometer. Data were stratified by age and sex for comparison with published normative strength series. Other demographic variables were evaluated using linear regression models. Results: Normative values for shoulder strength were generated. Age (p =.003, r 2 =.010) and sex (p <.001, r 2 =.026) were significant predictors of shoulder strength. Height (p =.03, r 2 =.010) was a significant predictor of strength in females and weight was a significant predictor of strength in males (p <.001, r 2 =.017). Hand dominance was also significant, with non-dominant shoulder strength associated with higher strength in females (p <.001, r 2 =.081) and lower strength in males (p <.001, r 2 =.154). Conclusion: This study generated normative shoulder strength values for a sample of the Australian population and provided a comparison between other normative scores. Significant demographic predictors in addition to age and sex were identified. Level of Evidence: III. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BACKGROUND: Few studies have addressed whether using manager or worker perceptions of safety policies and practices alone predict reported injury rates less accurately than using both. OBJECTIVE: This study provides an example and describes a method that can be used to address this issue with survey instruments designed to measure safety climate, policies, or practices. METHODS: Using multilevel logistic regression, we estimated the relationship between worker and manager perceptions of a given exposure and the odds of worker injury during the post-survey year for three safety scales. We tested whether surveying both workers and managers provides additional predictive value compared with surveying just one group, RESULTS: Injury in the year following the survey was significantly associated with worker scores on two of the three scales. Manager responses were not significantly associated with injury and did not significantly improve injury rate prediction when added to a model with only worker survey responses. CONCLUSIONS: The capacity of manager-only or worker-only perceptions of safety policies and practices to predict worker injuries should be established before choosing to survey just one or the other. The approach and findings in this paper can be applied to other survey instruments and in other settings to help make this choice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]