Originally Posted by
ShotOne
I’'m not clear why one would object to the medical conditions being self reported;
Because if you want an objective report on an illness/condition you need to see the medical records....and sadly yes, some people do exaggerate their illnesses, OTOH some play them down or don’t even mention them.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-report_study
are you contending that some of the sample might have falsely claimed to have cancer when they don't?
No idea if that happened in this survey sadly it is not impossible, however I
am definitely contending that there is a danger here of the stats being skewed by a phenomenon known as “self selection bias”,.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-selection_bias
Human nature being what it is somebody in good health, a bit busy, running around on a full roster sees a flyer/advert in a union magazine/e-mail labelled “crew heath survey” they will probably consign it to the “I might do that tomorrow” bucket....OTOH if you have suffered a significant health problem then people being people chances are they will take more interest and probably will complete the survey ... Potentially skewing the results in the direction of (in this case) a higher incidence of illness in the overall population than is actually the case.
As I understand it if you want to produce a meaningful survey of overall health in a community your participants are selected at random and you don’t let them self report major medical conditions....doing that costs money but if the intent is to get regulators and law makers to actually listen you need to spend it.