Public Health Surveying – Right at Your Door
NCIPH utilizes door-to-door data collection methods to obtain the highest quality results in community health surveying. Learn how it can work for your organization.
Community health assessments (CHAs) are an invaluable resource for mapping and analyzing public health needs across a population. NICPH’s one-of-a-kind Collect Smart technology utilizes Community Assessment for Public Health Emergency Response (CASPER), a tool that has been increasingly shown to produce the best results in emergency data collection as well as routine CHAs and surveys of all kind. What’s the secret? Whereas other methods utilize phone calls or online surveys, our strategy calls for direct door-to-door surveying.
The most common form of public health surveys today are utilizes random digital dialing (RDD), which is exactly what it sounds like – phone calls to randomly-chosen landlines within a study area. However, RDD validity is increasingly challenged by the fact that only 50% of US households today utilize a landline. Households with landlines tend to older and of a middle or higher socioeconomic class, and residents must be home in order to respond to surveyors, creating a potential for bias towards unemployed or retired workers.
Door-to-door surveying, or CASPER, presents an alternative in smaller survey areas. A recent study by Kahler Stone, MPH, et al. has found that door-to-door surveyors had a contact rate of 36.0% and a cooperation rate of 60.5%, compared with a 10.1% response rate for a RDD survey. Door-to-door household surveys captured a more diverse range of participants than RDD, with larger numbers of Hispanics and participants aged 18-24. Perhaps most appealing to health departments, the door-to-door survey cost less to conduct ($13,500) than the RDD survey ($100,000) and was logistically easier for the local health department to conduct using internally available resources.
The CASPER method was originally created by the World Health Organization and later adapted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for use in vaccine coverage and disaster response and by other organizations for use in meeting local health department accreditation and Affordable Care Act assessment requirements. Today, NCIPH uses door-to-door sampling methods in emergency response, community needs assessments, and other surveys to identify specific health and social impact concerns, such as prevalence of teen pregnancy or STDs in a community. Door-to-door sampling is accepted in North Carolina and by the Public Health Accreditation Board (PHAB) as an alternative to simple random and convenience sampling. CASPER utilizes a two-stage cluster sample method, which has been used in public health since 1960 and is favored for collecting data from across a large geographic area.
Given new evidence from Stone’s study, local health departments may want to consider the limitations of the study methods they typically employ to determine if door-to-door data collection might provide higher-quality results for less time and money. To learn more about how NCIPH can help you with your survey project and to discuss your options, contact us at nciph@unc.edu or (919) 966-7613.
