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Objectives. To study the effects of several survey features on response rates in a general population health survey. Methods. In 2012 and 2013, 8000 households in British Columbia, Canada, were randomly allocated to 1 of 7 survey variants, each containing a different combination of survey features. Features compared included administration modes (paper vs online), prepaid incentive ($2 coin vs none), lottery incentive (instant vs end-of-study), questionnaire length (10minutes vs 30minutes), and sampling frame (InfoCanada vs Canada Post). Results. The overall response rate across the 7 groups was 27.9% (range = 17.1-43.4). All survey features except the sampling frame were associated with statistically significant differences in response rates. The survey mode elicited the largest effect on the odds of response (odds ratio [OR] = 2.04; 95% confidence interval [CI] = 1.61, 2.59), whereas the sampling frame showed the least effect (OR = 1.14; 95% CI = 0.98, 1.34).The highest response was achieved by mailing a short paper survey with a prepaid incentive. Conclusions. In a mailed general population health survey in Canada, a 40% to 50% response rate can be expected. Questionnaire administration mode, survey length, and type of incentive affect response rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Early child development (ECD) – the development of physical, social–emotional, and language–cognitive capacities in the early years – is a foundation of health, well-being, learning, and behaviour across the life course. Consequently, the capacity to monitor ECD is an important facet of a modern society. This capacity is achieved by having in place an ongoing flow of high-quality information on the state of early child development, its determinants, and long-term developmental outcomes. Accordingly, there remains a considerable need for research that merges community-centred, longitudinal, and linked-data approaches to monitoring child development. The current paper addresses this need by introducing one method of summarising and quantifying the developmental trajectories of British Columbian children at the neighbourhood- or district-level: computing the Community Index of Child Development (CICD) for each geographic area. A simple index that describes change in children's developmental trajectories at the aggregate level, the CICD is computable because of our capacity to conduct individual-level linkage of two population data sets: the Early Development Instrument (EDI), a holistic measure of children's readiness for school which is administered at Kindergarten, and the British Columbia Ministry of Education's Foundation Skills Assessment (FSA), a Grade 4 measure of academic skills. In this paper, we demonstrate: (a) wide variation in the CICDs according to the children's district of residence in Kindergarten; (b) an association of the CICDs with an indicator of the socioeconomic character of the neighbourhoods; and (c) contrasting patterns of neighbourhood convergence and divergence in two different school districts – such that, in some areas, children from high vulnerability neighbourhoods tend to catch up between Kindergarten and Grade 4 whereas, in other areas, they tend to fall further behind. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This essay presents three film examples from across the cinemas of Canada which grapple with the politics of sobriety amidst unique cultural contexts: Werewolf (Ashley McKenzie, 2016) broaches the topic of opioid addiction on Cape Breton Island; Love in the Time of Civil War (Rodrigue Jean, 2014) of drug addiction on the streets of Montreal; and The Honour of All (Phil Lucas, 1992), the history of alcoholism on Esk'etemec First Nation in British Columbia. The narratives, aesthetics and modes of production of each film are analysed with an eye towards how they advance a new temperance sensibility that is non-prohibitionist, non-universalist and non-moralist. The three films are positioned within a canon of Canadian films about alcohol and substance misuse, as well as within a broader set of new temperance initiatives found in Canadian society at large. By selecting one film each from an English-Canadian, Acadian-Québécois and First Nations milieu, this paper proposes that their diffuse affinity for surviving addiction offers a means of organizing Canadian cultural studies for reasons other than national belonging, and conceives of temperance as an autonomous movement distinct from state-based public health solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]