Minimizing Respondent Burden Posted on October 26, 2007 Mark S. Bauer (bio) gives advice about simplifying what is required of participants.

The notion of respondent burden, or respondent load, is important to keep in mind. There are some patients that are extraordinarily highly motivated and well functioning that will do just about anything for just about as long as you want them to do it. They’ll fill out forms for two hours, they’ll keep twice daily rating scales, they will collect any biological sample at home, twenty-four hours a day that they possibly can, they’ll do whatever they can for you.

But that’s a small number of people and what you really want to do is to keep the respondent burden as low as possible. So ask the questions, how many questions do I need to ask to get this information? Where are the well-validated and reliable scales that are out there that are simple to do? Ask the tough questions about prioritizing what you want to get in terms of outcome batteries and basic assessments.

As researchers we’ve never met a piece of data that we didn’t like and didn’t want. Many of us have been at this for a while; know how much we don’t actually end up analyzing. So you need to really sort of hone down your assessment and outcomes batteries. And kind of a rule of thumb is if you can get an assessment in less than an hour and a half, you’re doing really pretty good for an intake. And can the follow-up batteries be as low as, as short as a half an hour to forty-five minutes, those are things that people, goals to shoot for.

The other side of it is how can you design interventions that are tolerable to people and that will actually be taken up? It’s great to have interventions for instance that require five times a day medication dosage or sixteen weekly sessions or eighteen weekly sessions to have an effect. But you have to be asking the question, what’s gonna be the uptake in general practice?

Not just because of the patients but also because of reimbursement strategies. Costs, medication costs and things like that. So you’re always thinking about how simply can we do things in order to get the maximal impact. And so you’re thinking a lot about designing sleek, slimmed down interventions that are really gonna target the outcomes that you want.

This has a couple of impacts on the other parts of your protocol design, such as your statistical analysis will have to account for more heterogeneity, have a more heterogeneous sample, but those are things that can be dealt with. So really simple assessment batteries and streamlined interventions that are gonna have a chance of surviving in the real world and having some public health impact.

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