Transitioning the Healthy Chicago Survey From a Telephone Mode to Self-administered by Mail Mode

Abstract

Context: As response rates to health surveys conducted by telephone continue to decline and costs continue to increase, practitioners are increasingly considering a transition to self-administered mail contact modes. Objective: To compare empirical differences observed across adjacent administrations of the Healthy Chicago Survey (HCS) conducted by telephone versus self-administered via mail contact. Design: Data from the 2016, 2018, and 2020 administrations of the HCS are contrasted, and demographic distributions are benchmarked against the American Community Survey to investigate differences that may be linked to the HCS' transition from a telephone to self-administered mail mode between 2018 and 2020. Setting: All survey data were collected from adult residents of Chicago, Illinois, between 2016 and 2020. Main Outcome Measures: Costs, response rates, key health statistics, demographic distributions, and measures of precision generated from the HCS. Results: The mail mode led to a response rate increase of 6.8% to 38.2% at half the cost per complete. Mail respondents are more likely to be nonminority, female, and hold a college degree. Key health statistic differences are mixed, but design effects are larger in the mail mode, which we attribute to more detailed geographic stratification and weighting employed in 2020. Conclusions: The mail mode is a less costly data collection strategy for the HCS, but it comes with trade-offs. The quasi-random selection of an individual in the household exacerbates sociodemographic distribution disparities.

The Effects of Interpersonal Violence on Sleep Following the COVID-19 Stay-at-Home Order

“…Respondents to recent self-administered versions of the HCS are more likely to be female, Non-Hispanic White, and higher educated than in interviewer-administered telephone versions prior to 2020. 24 Weighting procedures may not completely account for these discrepancies or for survey non-consent and non-response correlated with variables analyzed in the present study. Although self-reported sleep measures are often used on population-based surveys such as the Behavior Risk Factor Surveillance Survey, average sleep duration was self-reported at a point-in-time and other aspects of sleep, such as sleep quality, were not measured.…”

Evaluating Substitution as a Strategy for Handling U.S. Postal Service Drop Points in Self-Administered Address-Based Sampling Frame Surveys

“…Table 3 presents a similar comparison as Table 2, but in lieu of sociodemographic variables, key health outcomes-many of the same which were investigated by Unangst et al (2022)-are contrasted for DPU respondents and non-DPU substitute respondents. Aside from the 13.4 percentage point difference with respect to asthma and the 5.2 percentage point difference in hypertension rate, both of which are still not statistically significant at conventional levels, the health outcome distributions are remarkably similar.…”

“…Data from the survey have been used to support the implementation of Healthy Chicago 2.0 (https:// www.chicago.gov/city/en/depts/cdph/provdrs/healthychicago.html) and to develop various public health interventions and shape policies for addressing health inequities. To mitigate declining response rates and to more reliably achieve targeted survey completes within its 77 community areas (CAs) of interest, some of which contain fewer than 10,000 households, in 2020 the Chicago Department of Public Health transitioned the HCS into a self-administered, mail-contact survey of households via an ABS frame (Unangst et al 2022).…”

Mail to One or Mail to All? An Experiment (Sub)Sampling Drop Point Units in a Self-Administered Address-Based Sampling Frame Survey

“…In addition to data collection performance statistics, we compared across the two drop point experiment conditions the base-weighted distributions of the same demographic and key health outcome variables analyzed in Unangst et al (2022). These are presented in Figures 1 and 2, respectively.…”

“…Data analyzed in this paper were collected during the 2021 administration of the HCS, a survey launched by the Chicago Department of Public Health in 2014 as an annual, dual-frame, random-digit dial (DFRDD) telephone survey of adults in Chicago. The HCS transitioned into a mail contact, selfadministered, web/paper data collection mode survey using the "next birthday" method for within-household selection (Olson, Stange, and Smyth 2014) and an ABS frame beginning with the 2020 administration (Unangst et al 2022). Data from the survey have been used to support the implementation of Healthy Chicago 2.0 (https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/depts/cdph/ provdrs/healthychicago.html) and to shape a range of public health interventions and policies to mitigate health inequities.…”