Peer-reviewed article
How to increase participation and compliance in a national, school-based survey: strategies from the HBSC study 2018, 2022 and 2024 in Kalaallit Nunaat.
Mie Mølgaard Andersen, Kirsten Nystrup, Durita Lyngsø Svartá, Christina Viskum Lytken Larsen, Birgit Niclasen et al. ·
Summary
Written by AI, not yet AICS's view · claude-haiku-4-5-20251001This study examines how the HBSC (Health Behaviour in School-aged Children) survey improved school participation and student compliance rates in Greenland across three data collection waves in 2018, 2022, and 2024. The researchers tested different recruitment and survey strategies to address challenges in getting schools and students to participate fully. Key strategies that worked included on-site support staff, targeted follow-ups, scheduling coordination with schools, engaging school leadership, and using local authority networks. The study found that how the survey was administered and the level of school engagement significantly affected whether students completed it fully.
Key points
- Secondary onsite support, targeted follow-ups, and scheduled data collection dates increased school-based participation
- Supporting school engagement and leveraging local authority networks were effective in improving participation
- Survey administration mode and school engagement were significantly associated with compliance rates
- Respondent fatigue was a barrier to compliance, but electronic and revisitable survey administration helped reduce this problem
- Nesting the study within local context, community, and relationships was important for success
Limitations
This study describes strategies used to improve survey participation and compliance but does not evaluate the health and well-being outcomes themselves among Greenlandic children and adolescents. The findings are specific to school-based survey administration in Greenland and may have limited applicability to other settings or survey types.
Abstract
The Health Behaviour in School-aged Children (HBSC) study has an important role in monitoring health and well-being among children and adolescents in Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland), and the results are continuously used to inform and direct public health policies in Kalaallit Nunaat. However, the study has faced challenges in ensuring sufficient school-based participation and individual-level compliance, potentially diminishing the representativeness and validity of the study results. We examined how variations in data collection and survey strategies across waves of data collection in 2018, 2022 and 2024 may have influenced participation and compliance rates by comparing differences observed across the three waves. We found that secondary onsite support, targeted follow-ups, scheduling dates for data collection, supporting school engagement and leveraging local authority networks were effectful in increasing school-based participation. Compliance was significantly associated with the survey administration mode and was likely related to school engagement. Respondent fatigue remained a barrier for sufficient compliance; however, electronic, revisitable survey administration has mitigated this challenge. This study concludes that applying meaningful strategies during recruitment and data collection has real potential to increase school-based participation and compliance and underscores the importance of nesting the study within the local context, community and relations.