When and How Best to Use Online Panels for Epidemiologic Research
Join us on Wednesday, March 4th for the Department of Epidemiology seminar series featuring Dr. Ronald Kessler discussing When and How Best to Use Online Panels for Epidemiologic Research.
Abstract: Recent years have seen a sea change in population survey methods, with online panels increasingly replacing traditional in-person and telephone surveys. A small number of vendors now offer “probability-based” online panels, in which households are recruited using probability sampling methods. The Census Bureau’s new Household Trends and Outlook Pulse Survey (HTOPS) is based on such a panel. However, most online panel providers rely on nonprobability, or “opt-in,” samples. Online panels can substantially reduce costs and shorten the time from data collection to results, addressing mounting challenges faced by traditional survey modes. At the same time, they raise important concerns about selection bias and generalizability. This is true even in probability-based panels, which typically have effective response rates in the range 2-5% (i.e., they fail to represent 95-98% of the population). Given that online panels are now a permanent feature of the research landscape, an important question is whether there is a viable middle ground between traditional probability samples and purely opt-in designs. This presentation reviews the approaches that have been proposed to find such a middle ground and describes a hybrid design now being implemented in the new round of the World Mental Health Surveys.
Bio: Ronald Kessler, Ph.D. is the McNeil Family Professor of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School. He is a psychiatric epidemiologist whose work involves implementing mental health needs assessment surveys, preventive interventions, and clinical interventions for mental disorders and suicide-related behaviors. His intervention work focuses largely on developing precision intervention rules to get the right interventions to the right patients. He is the Director of the World Mental Health Surveys, a cross-national series of community epidemiological surveys on prevalence and correlates of common mental disorders in 30 countries (https://www.hcp.med.harvard.edu/wmh/). He is also the Harvard Site PI of the Study of Risk and Resilience in Servicemembers (STARRS), a coordinated series of epidemiological and neurobiological studies of social determinants of suicide-related behaviors among US Army soldiers and veterans (https://www.starrs-ls.org/), and of a series of pragmatic trials based on STARRS designed to reduce soldier suicide-related behaviors. Dr. Kessler is the author of over 1000 publications and has for many years been rated the most widely cited researcher in the field of psychiatry according to the Science-wide Author Databases of Standardized Citation Indicators. He is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, the US National Academy of Medicine, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He earned his Ph.D. in Sociology from New York University, completed a postdoctoral fellowship in psychiatric epidemiology at the University of Wisconsin, and was on the faculty at the University of Michigan before taking his current position at Harvard Medical School in 1995.
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Ronald Kessler, PhD
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