Asking About Prescription Drugs: Order and Encouragement Experiments

• Activity Number: 494
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Wednesday, August 12, 2015 : 8:30 AM to 10:20 AM
• Sponsor: Survey Research Methods Section
• Author(s): Mick Couper* and Mary Beth Ofstedal
• Companies: University of Michigan and University of Michigan
• Keywords: Internet survey ; Order effects ; Context effects ; Record use

Abstract

We designed an experiment in the 2013 Health and Retirement Study (HRS) Internet survey to test context effects on reporting of prescription drugs. The module included questions on whether the respondent was currently taking drugs for a series of common conditions and the number and names of drugs currently taken. The order of the question sets was randomized. Also, a random half of respondents were prompted at the beginning of the module to consult medication resources before answering the questions; the other half received no prompt. We hypothesized that asking about drugs taken for common problems would lead respondents to recall more drugs and that prompting them to use resources would result in higher use of such resources and better reporting of drugs. We found that question placement did not result in a significant difference in the number of drugs reported, but asking about drugs taken for specific medical conditions before asking general question about the number and names of drugs did lead to higher reporting of several of the conditions. Encouraging respondents to look at medication labels had a modest on the desired behavior.