A public health approach to bereavement support services in palliative care

摘要

Researchers who need to investigate the thoughts, feelings or behaviours of people are often faced with the problem of choosing which 'mode' to use for survey recruitment and/or response. The most common choices for self-completion questionnaire surveys are paper-based or web-based questionnaire forms. Occasionally telephone surveys are considered, but because of problems with population coverage (certain demographic groups are under-represented) and cognitive problems (only very simple questions and answers can reliably be addressed) this mode has fallen out of favour for all but the most trivial research questions. This has been known for at least a decade in the general survey methods literature, and was the subject of a recent Letter to the Editor in this journal.