Studying medical opinion: a comparison of telephone interviews and postal questionnaires to general practitioners

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Abstract
Telephone interviews have only recently been used to assess the attitudes and opinions of doctors, though they might have advantages over the more conventional technique of postal questionnaires. But would the two techniques provide the same results? To answer this, the attitudes of general practitioners towards a contemporary topic (ministerial proposals about the use of commercial deputising services) were measured in two ways. One sample of GPs returned postal questionnaires on the matter and a separate sample responded to a telephone interview. Very similar results were obtained overall by the two survey techniques. However, a higher proportion of extreme responses (i.e. oppose/support, rather than, tend to oppose/tend to support) was obtained by the telephone interview method; this method also appeared to encourage more ‘socially desirable’ responses.

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