Using police crash databases for injury prevention research - a comparison of opt-out and opt-in approaches to study recruitment.

Conclusions and Implications: The opt-in recruitment strategy (which was a consequence of one jurisdiction's interpretation of the national Privacy Act at the time) resulted in an insufficient and potentially biased sample for the purposes of conducting research into risk factors for heavy-vehicle crashes. Australia's national Privacy Act 1988 has had a long history of inconsistent practices by state and territory government departments and ethical review committees. These inconsistencies can have profound effects on the validity of research, as shown through the significantly different response rates we reported in this study. It is hoped that a more unified interpretation of the Privacy Act across the states and territories, as proposed under the soon-to-be-released Australian Privacy Principles(1) will reduce the recruitment challenges outlined in this study. PMID: 24890488 [PubMed - in process]
Source: Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health - Category: Global & Universal Authors: Tags: Aust N Z J Public Health Source Type: research