Challenges with interviewer administration of EQ-5D questionnaires in a large-scale population survey in China: a qualitative analysis
Tianxin Pan, Nan Luo, Zhuxin Mao, Xin Hong, Chao Li, Jie Wu, Nancy Devlin · 2026
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Description
Pan and co-authors audit how health survey interviews actually happen in this 2026 qualitative study from Nanjing, China. The focus is the EQ-5D. That five-question quality-of-life instrument is designed for self-completion. Yet large Chinese population surveys deliver it face to face. The team analyzed recordings of interviews thematically. Ten interviewers discussed their habits in focus groups.
Six non-standard approaches surfaced. Interviewers skipped questions, reworded them, or merged dimensions into one question. They altered the response options. They answered from their own reading of the respondent's story. Sometimes they asked nothing at all. Three drivers explained the drift. Low-literacy respondents struggled to comprehend. A long survey rewarded time-saving. And interviewers misunderstood the instrument as observer-rated rather than self-reported. The authors link shortcuts to the rosy ceiling effects in Chinese EQ-5D data. They prescribe interviewer training as the first fix.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Tianxin Pan, Nan Luo, Zhuxin Mao, Xin Hong, Chao Li, Jie Wu, Nancy Devlin |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 51 KB |
| LICENSE | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |