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Department of Nutrition and Gerontology Center, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802
Approximately one quarter of Americans aged 65 and older live in rural areas. Homebound rural elderly are a hard to reach, often poor and frail population. Failure to include homebound rural elderly in nutritional studies may bias representativeness of samples of elderly persons. This paper discusses some challenges in recruiting homebound older persons to participate in nutritional studies and in establishing quality control procedures in a field setting.
KEY WORDS: homebound rural elderly in-home assessment dietary recall anthropometric measurements disinterested refusers
1 Presented as part of a conference, "Nutrition Monitoring and Nutrition Status Assessment", at the first fall meeting of the American Institute of Nutrition, Charleston, South Carolina, December 810, 1989. The conference was supported in part by cooperative agreement HPU880004-02-1 with the DHHS Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, the USDA Human Nutrition Information Service, the DHHS National Center for Health Statistics, and the International Life Sciences Institute-Nutrition Foundation.
2 The Planning Committee for the meeting consisted of Drs. Helen A. Guthrie, Roy J. Martin, Linda D. Meyers, James A. Olson, Catherine E. Woteki, and Richard G. Allison (ex officio). The symposium papers were edited by a committee consisting of Dr. James Allen Olson (coordinator), Dept. of Biochemistry & Biophysics, Iowa State University, Ames, IA; Dr. Cathy C. Campbell, Division of Nutritional Sciences, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY; Dr. Roy J. Martin, Dept. of Foods & Nutrition, University of Georgia, Athens, GA; and Dr. Catherine E. Woteki, Food & Nutrition Board, National Academy of Sciences, Washington, DC.
3 The study was approved by the Office for Protection of Human Subjects, The Pennsylvania State University and the Clearfield County Area Agency on Aging.
Manuscript received 10 December 1989. Revision accepted 11 July 1990.