title: Characteristics of respondents and non-respondents to a mailed questionnaire.
abstract: In establishing a cohort of U.S. nurses, an assessment of response bias was made comparing respondents and non-respondents with regard to age, education, state of residence, employment status, field of employment, and major specialty. Overall, the 122,328 respondents (69.7 per cent) and 43,222 non-respondents were quite similar. Together with the reasonable response rate in a homogeneous population, this suggests that estimation of exposure-disease associations is unlikely to be affected by major bias due to non-response.
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001519:Behavior; D003710:Demography; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D009726:Nurses / Q000523:psychology*; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D014481:United States