T Hartwell

Comparison of respondents and nonrespondents to a worksite health screen.

As part of an evaluation of the voluntary health promotion program offered by Johnson & Johnson to its employees, comparisons were made between nonrespondents and respondents (75% of all employees) in the baseline health screen. A survey of randomly selected nonrespondents was conducted in 1979-1980 to collect health and life-style information. Comparisons between respondents and nonrespondents on a multitude of characteristics indicated that the nonrespondents reported life-styles as healthful as those of the respondents with the exception that significantly more nonrespondents reported ever having smoked cigarettes and significantly more female nonrespondents currently smoke. These results suggest that the systematic biases found among nonrespondents in general population health surveys do not exist among this more homogeneous employed population and imply that the participants in the program provide a good estimate of the health status and life-style of the entire workforce.

Challenges and processes of selecting outcome measures for the NIMH collaborative HIV/STD prevention trial

Objective:To review the challenges of designing behavioral and biological outcome measures for the multinational NIMH Collaborative HIV/STD Prevention Trial and provide the rationale for selecting these measures. Design:Although many different evidence-based prevention programmes have been developed, few have been evaluated in different countries, cultures, and populations. One issue in evaluating the generalized efficacy of any prevention approach is to identify a set of common outcome measures useful across diverse settings and peoples. The Trial is designed to evaluate whether the community popular opinion leader intervention can be adapted cross-nationally and cross-culturally for different populations and still retain its efficacy. Methods:Literature reviews, investigator experience, ethnographic study, pilot studies, and epidemiological studies were used to select the endpoints for the Trial. Results and conclusion:Both biological and behavioral data will be obtained at baseline and 12 and 24 months post-baseline. Communities that receive the intervention will be compared with matched control communities on two primary outcomes: (i) a change in self-reported unprotected sexual acts with non-spousal, non-live-in partners; and (ii) the incidence of sexually transmitted disease (STD), defined as a composite index of viral and bacterial STD.