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It's a good attempt but I see a telephone survey as being just as limiting as other data sources you fault as too limited. Personally, if I got a call from someone claiming to be with the CDC I'd probably chuckle before hanging up. I doubt they'd get far enough to try and pitch a survey. I think lots of folks like myself have grown weary of constant spam telephone calls and don't tolerate much. I doubt I would believe it really was the CDC. CallerID has pretty much fallen apart and can't be relied upon, so we're left with no way to verify. If they somehow get past folks initial reaction, then they've got to get lucky enough to have found someone who would tolerate a detailed and lengthy survey.Recreational scuba divers are not that well described. The challenge researchers face is finding a representative sample. For example, if we conduct a survey of ScubaBoard members then that might be biased towards one segment of our community, but ignore others. Same if we survey dive club members, or insured divers, or newly certified divers... Over the years, if you take all these types of studies into account, we might generally paint a picture of who we are. But, to obtain a proper snapshot we would need to randomly sample people and ask "Are you a diver?". To do this in a small village might be affordable, but to get a nationally representative sample would cost millions of dollars. And,... that is just what the CDC have done.
The CDC coordinate a year-round random telephone-based survey in every US state and, in three of the last six years, in addition to the nearly 300 questions they've asked about people's lives, they have also asked if people were active in the previous month. If so, were they most active at scuba diving? So, for what may be the first large scale random sample survey of active US scuba divers, anyone interested can download the short, two-page paper here: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2047487318790290
I don't know about the rest of you, but I see more than a passing resemblance to me in these results.
So if I lived in Florida and averaged roughly 4 days of diving a month (50 days and 100 dives per year), but played golf or tennis more than 4 times a month, I would not have been included as an active diver in the survey. Is that correct?The people who said they were active, and most active at scuba, were included in our study.
We dumped the land line a couple of years ago. Seems the survey guys more & more have discovered our 2 cell phones. Just got one today.No survey for me. I haven't had a landline since 1999.
So if I lived in Florida and averaged roughly 4 days of diving a month (50 days and 100 dives per year), but played golf or tennis more than 4 times a month, I would not have been included as an active diver in the survey. Is that correct?
Mrs Flush and I seem to go through bouts of calls on our cell. We'll go a couple of months getting calls then blocking the number then there will be six that we don't get any. Luckily we are both at a point in our life that we pretty well know every call that is coming in.We dumped the land line a couple of years ago. Seems the survey guys more & more have discovered our 2 cell phones. Just got one today.
Don’t blame the people who don’t/won’t answer the phone, blame the infestation of telemarketers and phone scammers that ruined peoples’ trust.Being on the other side of the barricade (meaning, being a scientist), I know how much frustrating can be not getting any pivotal informations just because people are too lazy/busy/scared to answer the phone.
And this applies to so many aspect of public health, not only for diving purposes, including cancer surveys and other diseases...
Being on the other side of the barricade (meaning, being a scientist), I know how much frustrating can be not getting any pivotal informations just because people are too lazy/busy/scared to answer the phone.
And this applies to so many aspect of public health, not only for diving purposes, including cancer surveys and other diseases...
Don’t blame the people who don’t/won’t answer the phone, blame the infestation of telemarketers and phone scammers that ruined peoples’ trust.