Abstract
BackgroundWe studied whether health resources, measured as sense of coherence (SOC), are associated with participation in a follow-up survey among permanent and non-permanent employees who responded at baseline.MethodsOf a cohort of 5,981 permanent employees, those who after four years were still in the service of the same employer were asked to participate in a follow-up survey. Another cohort consisted of 2,194 fixed-term and 682 subsidised employees; among these the follow-up survey was posted to those whose addresses were found in the population register. Non-participation was divided into loss to follow-up (i.e., failure to locate the individual, death and, among permanent employees, turnover or exit from labour market) and non-response to the follow-up survey. Logistic regression analyses were used to examine whether the respondents differed from the non-respondents with respect to SOC and other characteristics at baseline.ResultsAmong permanent employees the follow-up survey yielded 3,998 respondents, 1,051 were lost, and 932 did not reply. Among non-permanent employees the follow-up survey yielded 1,563 respondents on initially fixed-term and 467 on subsidised contracts, the corresponding figures for those lost were 145 and 38, and for the non-respondents 486 and 177. Low SOC was associated with lower response rate among fixed-term but not among permanent or subsidised employees. No association was found between SOC and loss to follow-up.ConclusionSOC is a potential source of non-random sample attrition and should be taken into account for when estimating bias due to non-participation in occupational cohorts that include fixed-term employees.
Highlights
We studied whether health resources, measured as sense of coherence (SOC), are associated with participation in a follow-up survey among permanent and non-permanent employees who responded at baseline
Statistical analysis We carried out logistic regression analyses to obtain the odds ratios and their 95 percent confidence intervals that reflected the associations between the SOC, demographic
Exit from the follow-up cohort of permanent employees did not depend on SOC (Table 1)
Summary
We studied whether health resources, measured as sense of coherence (SOC), are associated with participation in a follow-up survey among permanent and non-permanent employees who responded at baseline. The epidemiological knowledge of work-related risks is based mostly on follow-up studies of occupational cohorts in particular workplaces. Such studies are becoming more complicated, as the instability of work life is increasing due to increasing proportions of various tem-. The reasons for attrition are, in addition to refusal to participate, death or severe illness and failure to locate the individuals. Distinguishing those who cannot be contacted is important, because the mechanism of non-participation may influence the nature of the attrition bias [1,2,3].
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