Conducting Telephone Interviews with Community-dwelling Older Adults in a State Medicaid Program: Differences by Ethnicity and Language Preference

We document the methodological challenges of conducting a health survey of an ethnically diverse elderly community-dwelling Medicaid population by telephone. Individuals (N=5,382) 65 years and older were randomly selected from a state Medicaid Management Information System and 618 eligible participants were interviewed. Participants were classified as non-Hispanic White, English-speaking (NHW-E; 69.2%), non-Hispanic Black, English-speaking (NHB-E; 6.2%), Hispanic, Spanish-speaking (H-S; 9.2%), and Hispanic, English-speaking (H-E; 4.2%). Almost half (44.2%) of the individuals sampled were unreachable, most often because of no valid telephone number. More interviewer time was required to reach and interview Hispanic participants. On average, interviews with H-S and H-E were 11 and 8 minutes longer, respectively, than with NHW-E. Spanish-speaking Hispanic respondents reported very high rates of receipt of preventive services relative to the other groups. These high rates by Spanish-speakers may be due to actual greater utilization or biases in self-reported data due to response style differences.