ESRA 2027 sessions by theme
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Innovations in Health Survey Data Collection: Balancing Cost Efficiency, Data Quality, and Participation |
| Coordinator 1 | Professor Hanna Tolonen (Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare, Helsinki, Finland) |
| Coordinator 2 | Professor Sarah Cuschieri (University of Malta, Msida, Malta) |
Session Details
Social surveys remain one of the most important tools for understanding populations, social inequalities, health behaviours, and living conditions. However, many of today's societal challenges, including population ageing, chronic diseases, health inequalities, and the interactions between social and health determinants, require richer and more integrated data sources than traditional questionnaire-based surveys alone can provide.
This session explores a broad range of strategies for how social surveys can remain sustainable, policy-relevant and informative in the face of declining response rates, increasing data collection costs, and increasing information needs. We invite contributions examining methodological, ethical, practical, and analytical approaches to enriching social surveys with health information. Health data may include self-reported measures collected through interviews or self-administered questionnaires, as well as objective measurements such as anthropometry, blood pressure, physical activity monitoring, biomarkers, biological specimens, cognitive assessments, and other health examination components.
The session also welcomes research on push-to-web designs, mixed-mode data collection, survey process innovations, and linking survey data with external data sources, including administrative health registers, electronic health records, claims databases, as well as the use of emerging technologies such as wearable devices, artificial intelligence (AI), and real-time data collection tools. Particular attention should be paid to issues of data quality, representativeness, transparency, privacy, informed consent, algorithmic bias, and public trust.
Contributions exploring the role of AI and other digital innovations in health data collection and health measurement are particularly welcome. Topics may include AI-assisted interviewing, conversational agents, adaptive questionnaires, analysis of voice, text, image or sensor data, AI-supported extraction of health indicators from unstructured data, and novel methods for combining survey responses with digital traces and administrative records.
