Survey methodology and prevalence estimates from the SPAACE (surveying the prevalence of food allergy in all Canadian environments) study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction: Low income, less educated and immigrant populations are notorious for having low response rates in research studies. Therefore, it is not surprising that when attempting to estimate food allergy prevalence in Canada, the SCAAALAR study (Surveying Canadians to Assess the Prevalence of Common food Allergies and Attitudes towards food LAbeling and Risk), which attained a response rate of only 34.6% , underrepresented several vulnerable populations (those of low socioeconomic status, non post-secondary graduates, new Canadians, residents of the territories and Aboriginals).Objective: The objective of this thesis is two fold: 1) to determine an effective methodology for obtaining high response rates in the vulnerable populations not adequately represented in SCAAALAR and 2) to attain food allergy prevalence estimates for these vulnerable populations.Methods: To increase response rates and adequately sample the desired populations, a pilot study was conducted to evaluate the effect of unconditional incentives in vulnerable populations for a telephone survey. Households in low income/high immigrant postal codes were randomly selected and randomly assigned to receive either an unconditional incentive or no incentive. The difference in response rate and 95% confidence interval was calculated using a normal approximation to the difference of two binomial distributions. The pilot study informed the methodology employed in the SPAACE study (Surveying the8Prevalence of Food Allergy in All Canadian Environments), which subsequently addressed the second objective of this Thesis. SPAACE then estimated the prevalence of food allergy for those of low socioeconomic status, non post-secondary graduates, new Canadians, residents of the territories and Aboriginals. Prevalence estimates among vulnerable populations were compared to their comparator populations (i.e., those of high socioeconomic status, post-secondary graduates, individuals born in Canada, residents of the provinces and non-Aboriginals); between population differences and 95% confidence intervals were calculated using normal approximations to the difference of two binomial distributions.Results: The response rates were 38.4% and 31.4% for the incentive and non-incentive groups respectively, with a between group difference of 0.070 (-0.013, 0.15). The cooperation rates, which exclude non-contacts from the calculation, were 47.3% and 40.0% for the incentive and non-incentive group respectively, with a between group difference of 0.073 (-0.023, 0.17). Prevalence estimates for those of low socioeconomic status, new Canadians and Aboriginals were lower than their comparator population's prevalence (between population differences respectively: -2.44% (95% CI: -3.52%, -1.35%); -2.66% (95% CI: -3.5%, -1.82%); -2.17% (95% CI: -3.18%, -1.16%)) .Discussion: Although wide confidence intervals preclude definitive conclusions, our results suggest that unconditional incentives are an effective means of9increasing response rates in vulnerable populations for telephone surveys. Additionally, the results of SPAACE demonstrate that socioeconomic status, birthplace and ethnicity are associated with the prevalence of food allergy. These findings are indicative of potential lifestyle, cultural, and genetic factors that may influence the development of food allergy.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.099 | 0.032 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".