Handbook of Health Survey Methods

Timothy P. Johnson

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781118002322
• eBook ISBN: 9781118594742
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Insurance

A comprehensive guidebook to the currentmethodologies and practices used in health surveys A unique and self-contained resource, Handbook of Health Survey Methods presents techniques necessary for confronting challenges that are specific to health survey research. The handbook guides readers through the development of sample designs, data collection procedures, and analytic methods for studies aimed at gathering health information on general and targeted populations. The book is organized into five well-defined sections: Design and Sampling Issues, Measurement Issues, Field Issues, Health Surveys of Special Populations, and Data Management and Analysis. Maintaining an easy-to-follow format, each chapter begins with an introduction, followed by an overview of the main concepts, theories, and applications associated with each topic. Finally, each chapter provides connections to relevant online resources for additional study and reference. The Handbook of Health Survey Methods features:

• 29 methodological chapters written by highly qualified experts in academia, research, and industry
• A treatment of the best statistical practices and specific methodologies for collecting data from special populations such as sexual minorities, persons with disabilities, patients, and practitioners
• Discussions on issues specific to health research including developing physical health and mental health measures, collecting information on sensitive topics, sampling for clinical trials, collecting biospecimens, working with proxy respondents, and linking health data to administrative and other external data sources
• Numerous real-world examples from the latest research in the fields of public health, biomedicine, and health psychology

Handbook of Health Survey Methods is an ideal reference for academics, researchers, and practitioners who apply survey methods and analyze data in the fields of biomedicine, public health, epidemiology, and biostatistics. The handbook is also a useful supplement for upper-undergraduate and graduate-level courses on survey methodology.

Chapter One
Origins and Development of Health Survey Methods

Timothy P. Johnson

Survey Research Laboratory, College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs, University of Illinois at Chicago, Illinois, USA

1.1 Introduction

The health survey methodologies considered in this handbook have been under continuous development for the past 150 years. The story of their emergence has been one of tools and ideas borrowed from many disciplines, such as demography, economics, medicine, nursing, psychology, public health, social work, sociology, and statistics, to address the concerns of social reformers, health care providers, community advocates, business interests, government planners, policy makers, and academic modelers. Indeed, the statistics derived from health surveys have served multiple purposes and multiple audiences. This chapter provides a brief overview of their origins and development.

1.2 Precursors of Modern Health Surveys

The first recognizable health surveys are no doubt lost to history. It is known, however, that public health problems associated with early industrialization and rapid urbanization during the nineteenth century motivated some of the earliest empirical inquiries that exhibited characteristics not greatly unlike what is now considered modern health survey research (Ackerknecht 1948, Elesh 1972, Rosen 1955). The efforts of Kay (1832) and Booth (1889–1902) to examine poverty conditions in the British cities of Manchester and London, respectively, were in fact early applications of survey methodology to address health-related problems. Booth's Life and Labour of the People of London, in particular, was noted for the development of poverty maps, which provided graphical representations of the geographic distribution of poverty indicators across London (Pfautz 1967). Similar efforts were conducted by Villermé (1840), who investigated health conditions among factory workers in France in his volume Survey of the Physical and Moral Condition of Workers Employed in Cotton, Wool and Silk Factories, and Johann Peter Frank, who conducted crude surveys of health and social conditions in several Italian provinces in 1786 (Frank 1941). The focus of these early studies on relationships among health, environment, and socioeconomic status became a recurrent and often dominant theme over subsequent decades as health survey tools continued to be developed and refined (cf. Ciocco et al. 1954, Krieger 2011, Sydenstricker 1933a).

Later poverty studies by Rowntree (1910) in York and Bowley and Burnett-Hurst (1915) in Reading and several other English cities each made independent methodological contributions. Rowntree may have been the first to employ a staff of survey interviewers to collect data. Possibly the earliest reported use of systematic random sampling was during the survey conducted in Reading by Bowley, who also included a detailed assessment of the accuracy of his findings that considered each of the sources of error now commonly recognized as part of the total survey error model. Following in the British tradition, poverty surveys, each linking adverse health events with the onset of poverty, were conducted in the U.S. cities of Buffalo in 1887 (Warner 1930), New York City in 1905 (Frankel 1906–1907), and Baltimore in 1916–1917 (Ciocco and Perrott 1957). In none of these efforts, however, were health conditions the central focus of the research but rather one of many factors crudely measured because of their perceived association with poverty and economic status.

Other nineteenth century research focused on urban sanitary conditions and their relationship to population health. One of the earliest such efforts that relied in part on empirical observations was Chadwick's (1842) Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain, which led to new public health legislation (Rosen 1958). Sanitary research similar to Chadwick's was also undertaken by public health practitioners in the United States concerned with emerging epidemics in rapidly expanding American cities (Bulmer et al. 1991, Peterson 1983, Rosenberg 1962). Most notable were the sanitary surveys conducted in Boston by Shattuck (1850) and in New York by Griscom (1845) and subsequently in numerous other cities. Several such surveys were sponsored by the Russell Sage Foundation, which also supported other early health-related surveys in dozens of communities in the United States and Canada (Department of Surveys and Exhibits 1915). One of the more well-known and comprehensive of these was conducted in Springfield, Illinois, in 1910 (Palmer 1912, Schneider 1915). Sanitary surveys also were conducted by the U.S. Public Health Service, which was reorganized and renamed (formerly known as the Public Health and Marine Hospital Service) in 1912 and charged with conducting field research into human disease and public sanitation (Furman and Williams 1973). Between 1914 and 1916, a series of these surveys were conducted by the Public Health Service in rural areas across the nation (Lumsden 1918). The methodologies employed in conducting sanitary surveys were varied, involving numerous approaches to evaluating community conditions. As such, there was at best only partial overlap with what we now consider to be modern health survey research.¹ Although crude approximations by today's standards and widely criticized at the time (Elmer 1914, Schneider 1917), these efforts nonetheless demonstrated the value and importance of systematic observation for the study of health, environment, and related social conditions and contributed to dramatic improvements in public health in the United States and many other nations.

Similar to sanitary surveys in their diversity of methods and focus on action research—but more broadly framed—were the studies conducted as part of the social survey movement in the early years of the twentieth century (Burgess 1916). Covering topics such as housing, adult and child labor, immigration, economics, and criminal justice, in addition to health, these studies perhaps were most accurately described as “social inventories” of communities (Harrison 1912). As with the early sanitary surveys, a variety of practical methods in addition to, or in some cases instead of, household interviews were employed.² Perhaps the most well known of these was the Pittsburgh Social Survey, conducted from 1907–1908 (Greenwald and Anderson 1996). Several other important social surveys focused their investigations on specific racial or ethnic groups, including Blacks in Philadelphia (DuBois 1899) and the Polish in Buffalo (Kellogg 1912). Eaton and Harrison (1930) cataloged the vast numbers of social surveys conducted in the first several decades of the last century. Although more broad in their coverage, health remained an important topic in these social surveys; in fact, many of them employed questionnaires to collect health information from respondents. The Pittsburgh social survey, for example, reported on the costs of illness in terms of lost wages, medical bills, medications, hospitalization, and so on (Kellogg 1912), and a survey conducted of residences in the Chicago Stockyards District in 1909–1910 reported information regarding family medical expenditures (Kennedy 1914).

Possibly the first studies specifically designed to collect national health data in the United States were the decennial Censuses of 1880 and 1890, which collected household information regarding persons who were currently “sick or temporarily disabled,” “blind,” “deaf and dumb,” “idiotic,” “insane,” and “maimed, chrippled [sic], bedridden, or otherwise disabled” (Department of the Interior, Census Office 1888 1895).³ Late in the nineteenth century, the U.S. Bureau of Labor also collected illness data as part of economic canvassing surveys conducted in urban slum areas of four large cities: Baltimore, Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia. This Special Investigation of the Slums of Great Cities concluded that rates of sickness were unexpectedly low, given the “wretched conditions” in which these populations lived (Osborn 1895). The Ch...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter One: Origins and Development of Health Survey Methods
• Part One: Design and Sampling Issues
• Part Two: Design and Measurement Issues
• Part Three: Field Issues
• Part Four: Health Surveys of Special Populations
• Part Five: Data Management and Analysis
• Index
• End User License Agreement