Abstract
BackgroundLittle is known about the relationship between early life factors and survey response in epidemiological studies of adults.MethodsThe Children of the 1950s cohort is composed of 12,150 children (boys 51.7%) born in Aberdeen 1950–56 and in primary schools in the city in 1962. Information on birth weight, gestational age, growth, behaviour and socio-economic position at birth and in childhood were obtained from contemporaneous records. Cognitive test scores at ages 7,9 and 11 years were also available from school records. The outcome was response to a postal questionnaire sent (2001–2003) to surviving cohort members in middle age.ResultsOf 11,282 potentially mailed subjects, 7,183 (63.7%) returned questionnaires. Response rates were highest among females, and those whose parents were married at birth, were in a non-manual social class at birth or in childhood, had fewer siblings, were taller and heavier in childhood for their age and had lower Rutter B behavioural scores. Childhood cognitive test scores at every age were strongly and positively related to the response rate to a postal questionnaire independently of other early life factors monotonically across the entire range of test scores. Those in the bottom fifth at age 11 had a response rate of 49% while those in the top fifth 75%.ConclusionThe strength and consistency of the association of childhood cognition with questionnaire response rate in middle age is surprisingly large. It suggests that childhood cognition across the entire normal range is a powerful influence on the complex set of later behaviours that comprise questionnaire response. The extent of possible response bias in epidemiological studies of the associations between childhood characteristics (particularly those related to cognition) and later health is probably larger than is generally realised, at least in situations where the survey instrument is a postal questionnaire.
Highlights
Little is known about the relationship between early life factors and survey response in epidemiological studies of adults
It is well known that many characteristics measured in adulthood such as gender, age, socio-economic position, education, health status and smoking habits are associated with response rate [2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10]
In males and females response rates were higher for subjects whose mothers were married and whose fathers were in a nonmanual social class when they were born
Summary
Little is known about the relationship between early life factors and survey response in epidemiological studies of adults. Very little is known about the association of characteristics in infancy and childhood with response or recruitment rates in adulthood. This is partly because there are relatively few contexts in which unbiased data on early life characteristics are available for the total population irrespective of later response behaviour. The increasing interest in life-course epidemiology [11,12], in which adult disease is related to factors across an individual's life course, makes an investigation of these early-life influences on response rate pertinent at this time
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