Reflections on the development and implementation of a university student health and well-being online survey: the BOOST-Well project

Background:
First year university students may be at risk of poor health behaviours and outcomes. Traditionally, online surveys assessing multiple aspects of the health and well-being of university students have poor response rates, meaning the representative of such data may be questionable. Therefore, the purpose of the study was to develop an online survey of health behaviours, health and well-being for university students with higher participation and completion rates than what is typically reported.

Methods:
An online survey was developed following the six recommendations from Javidan et al. 1 to maximise the participation and response rates. All new students (defined as commencing a degree that semester) from medical and allied health postgraduate programs from one Faculty were requested to participate. The survey included 136 items, most of which were validated questionnaires commonly used in national surveys. Participants were requested to complete the online survey on their own device during scheduled class time.

Results:
Of the 273 eligible students, 217 (79.5%) participants viewed the initial section of the questionnaire, with 201 (73.6%) partially (n=27, 9.9%); or fully (n=174; 63.7%) completing the survey. Median completion time was 14.4 (12.3 – 16.8) minutes. Questions that asked students to report on frequency or duration of health behaviours such as physical activity had some interpretation issues, whereby it was unclear if ‘zero’ and ‘blank’ responses meant non-participation or true ‘missing’ values for some items.

Conclusions:
Our response rate (63%) was substantially greater than in other Australian and international university student health surveys, which are typically <15%. We feel our substantially greater response rates than the literature reflected our attempt to follow the recommendations of Javidan et al. 1 which included enlisting Faculty support, assigning student representatives, incorporating participant input, offering incentives and allowing students time to complete the survey in scheduled class time.