Posts Tagged ‘Epidemiology’
Can social networks be used for epidemiology data collection
Collecting data on a human population has become more expensive per head in the past 10 years. Studies have suffered from low response rates and a higher drop-out rates in longer term studies. The reason is that there are many more media of communication thus raising the distraction noise and lowering attention spans.
A study from Sweden in 2008 by Christin Bexelius showed a much improved response from web based research when compatred to Interactive Voice Response (IVR)
Sweden has today among the highest Internet and cell phone penetration in the world, making the population suitable for introducing new technologies in data collection (11). The Department of Medical Epidemiology and Biostatistics (MEB) at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden has since 2001 designed and evaluated several studies using e-epidemiology. In 2003, the first large scale web-based study including 47,859 women in the age group 41-60 was conducted (12). Today, the department has used the Internet for several large scale population-based studies, including an Internet based-hearing test and a surveillance system utilizing IVR and a web-based application. .
Social Media can now be adapted specifically to the needs of the researcher and web-based questionnaires can either be delivered to PC’s or to mobile phones. So could social networks play a role in data collection on a population?
