Sampling 'hard-to-reach' populations in health research: yield from a study targeting Americans living in Canada
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Some populations targeted in survey research can be hard to reach, either because of lack of contact information, or non-existent databases to inform sampling. Here, we present a methodological "case-report" of the yield of a multi-step survey study assessing views on health care among American emigres to Canada, a hard-to-reach population. METHODS: To sample this hard-to-reach population, we held a live media conference, supplemented by a nation-wide media release announcing the study. We prepared an 'op-ed' piece describing the study and how to participate. We paid for advertisements in 6 newspapers. We sent the survey information to targeted organizations. And lastly, we asked those who completed the web survey to send the information to others. We use descriptive statistics to document the method's yield. RESULTS: The combined media strategies led to 4 television news interviews, 10 newspaper stories, 1 editorial and 2 radio interviews. 458 unique individuals accessed the on-line survey, among whom 310 eligible subjects provided responses to the key study questions. Fifty-six percent reported that they became aware of the survey via media outlets, 26% by word of mouth, and 9% through both the media and word of mouth. CONCLUSION: Our multi-step communication method yielded a sufficient sample of Americans living in Canada. This combination of paid and unpaid media exposure can be considered by others as a unique methodological approach to identifying and sampling hard-to-reach populations.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.555 | 0.887 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it