Home From Home - Northern Ireland Housing Executive

Due to the nature of the survey, the Research Unit decided that face-toface
interviews were required to maximise the response rate. In view of the
significance of the project, it was felt that the involvement of people with
links to the Chinese Community in Derry/Londonderry was essential to
enable access to and participation from this community.
The questionnaire design, analysis and report writing were the responsibility
of the Housing Executive's Research Unit. The content of the questionnaire
was agreed in consultation with the Chinese Welfare Association and Western
Investing for Health. The bilingual interviewers carried out face-to-face
structured interviews between July and September 2006.
The CWA's Sai Pak Project used its current database of membership to
identify households for interview; in addition the Research Unit used a
'snowball 2 ' sampling technique to extend the CWA's known database.
1.6 Response Rate
In total, 100 Chinese households were identified. The interviewers
subsequently carried out 91 face-to-face interviews in the North West.
Of the 91 households surveyed, 34 included an older Chinese person
(aged 50 or older).
As a general rule, if an interview had not been achieved on the first visit to
an address, the fieldworker made at least three further attempts to interview
the household. These visits were made at varying times of the day and also
in the evenings. If, at the end of the fieldwork period, the fieldworker had
been unable to contact a household member, the address was recorded as a
non-contact. The research team was unable to contact only five households
in total and four households refused to take part in the survey.
2
Snowball sampling involves identifying respondents who are then asked to refer researchers to other respondents.
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