I was called by a pollster the other day, with a survey about the health of Montana residents, in partnership with the CDC. I immediately told her that I’m not in Montana any more (that’s the area code of my cell phone), but she said that most of the questions still applied, and so I went ahead and answered (I know how hard it is to get good polling data).
Well, it was a fairly lengthy survey, five or ten minutes long, and asked about all sorts of things: When I last went in for a checkup, how much stress I’m under in my life, whether I’d ever had a heart attack, cancer, or a number of other maladies, what my diet is like, and so on: All things that made sense to ask in a poll about health.
But notably, one thing the survey didn’t ask about was the current pandemic. At all. There was no question about whether I’m vaccinated, or about whether I’d ever had covid, or whether I’m wearing a mask when I go out in public, or anything else relating to the disease. The closest it came was “When was your most recent vaccination, such as a flu shot?”.
Now, as far as health is concerned, right now, COVID-19 is kind of the elephant in the room. And I get that the CDC is concerned about all diseases, not just one, and so a poll might well have some other primary focus. But you’d think that if they’re going to the trouble to conduct a proper survey, and it’s already that long, it’d only make sense to include some basic questions about the pandemic, too. So why didn’t they?
If it was the NHIS (National Health Interview Survey), it’s been going on since 1959 and they only update the questions every 15-20 years or so.
While the NHIS has been conducted continuously since 1957, the content of the survey has been updated about every 15-20 years to incorporate advances in survey methodology and coverage of health topics. In January 2019, NHIS launched a redesigned content and structure that differs from its previous questionnaire design (1997–2018).
Yes, they already know how many are vaccinated, but there’d still be valuable data in the cross-tabs. Do people who have had covid have more stress? Are people who have had check-ups lately more likely to have been vaccinated? And so on.
But I suppose it makes sense if this same survey, with the same questions, has been asked for many years. There’d also be value in asking the same questions repeatedly.
One suspects that the long term aims of the survey are not well met by churn of questions. If they allow additional questions there is a danger that over time continual pressure from all parts of heath sciences will add ever more questions and it dilutes and damages the ability of the survey to provide the long term trending and analysis that is its principal job.
You can be sure to here are thousands of interesting questions that various researchers could think of to add. A policy of only updating the questions at very long intervals is a great way of keeping things under control.
The last thing you want is a queue of academic researchers at your door demanding that you support their particular area of research. Before you know it you have a competitive application process, selection panels, arguments, appeals process, the cost blows out and exactly nobody is happy.
Yes, that is a thing that can happen. Everybody wants to add just a few questions… COVID though is clearly something special. Very few other things have had that kind of impact on so many people all at once. Many of the projects I work with have added COVID supplements, and NIH has even made money available to support collecting additional COVID data.
Long term studies also have to update occasionally. Instruments change, fields change, laws change, etc., and studies have to adjust to keep up. For example, some of the studies I’m associated with started when the DSM-III was state of the art.
That does make lots of extra work for researchers to reconcile the time points, but the alternative can be irrelevance and loss of funding.
Cynical take, might Montana House Bill 702 be a factor? It makes an individual’s vaccination status as a protected category, and prohibits employers from requiring employees to disclose their immunization status and bars employers from requiring employees to receive certain types of vaccines or to possess an immunity passport. It also makes it illegal to refuse to serve or withhold goods from any person based on the person’s vaccination status or whether the person has an immunity passport. Might there be language that applies to surveys as well since this was clearly enacted in response to COVID?
Heh, back in the late 70s I worked for a few weeks selling over priced magazine subscriptions over the phone. We used “in partnership with Boys Clubs of America” in our spiel, even though Boys Clubs of America knew nothing about us, other than the fact that we occasionally sent them a few dollars to keep up the façade.
Your situation may be totally different, but someone saying something on the phone doesn’t mean that it is true.
Well, it’s not like I asked the pollster for documentation of who she was, but it certainly sounded like a legitimate survey, and I’m not sure what incentive anyone would have had to fake it. There weren’t any push-questions or sales pitches or anything.
I’m just very cynical about stuff like this, to the point that I never answer my phone (unknown numbers don’t even ring, just straight to voicemail).
At work last year my receptionist told me a cop was on the phone wanting to talk to me. She looked worried, as though maybe they’d found a body and found my prints on the murder weapon.
I picked up the phone and the guy introduced himself, like “Hi, this is Lieutenant Michaels of the State Police”. I replied, “hey, this is Pope Kayaker, head of the Catholic Church, how can the holy see be of assistance?”. The caller hung up, I heard nothing more.