A Comparison of Mail and Face-to-Face Responses in a Dual-Mode Survey of Physicians

• Activity Number: 141
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Monday, August 2, 2010 : 8:30 AM to 10:20 AM
• Sponsor: Section on Survey Research Methods
• Author(s): Esther Hing*+ and Chun-Ju Hsiao and Paul Beatty
• Companies: National Center for Health Statistics and National Center for Health Statistics and National Center for Health Statistics
• Keywords: Physician survey ; dual mode survey ; item response

Abstract

The National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey (NAMCS) is an annual survey of office-based physicians and visits to their practices. Since its inception, the survey has been conducted face-to-face, but in order to provide better estimates of physician adoption and use of electronic medical records (EMR), the original sample was augmented with a supplemental sample of physicians who reported EMR-based content from NAMCS through a mail questionnaire. Mail and face-to-face survey data from 2008 were combined for the first time to produce dual-mode estimates. This paper outlines the survey sample design by mode. The paper also compares responses and item response by mode according to physician and practice characteristics. Although mail survey respondents were less likely to provide certain numeric responses than face-to-face respondents, most results were comparable across modes.