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A systematic review of the literature on survey questionnaires to assess self-medication practices
(2017)
Self-medication is of great public health importance as it often bypasses regulatory mechanisms to assure quality of health care. Nevertheless there are no established standards on how to assess self-medication. We therefore intended to systematically retrieve questionnaires and survey tools used to capture self-medication, with the aim to identify the scope of information investigated in this context and commonalities between the tools. We conducted a systematic review of the literature on questionnaires used for self-medication assessment by searching PubMed and Web of Science databases using the combinations of following keywords; self-medication, self-prescription, non-prescription, questionnaire. Truncation was used to ensure retrieval of all possible variations of search terms. The search was limited to articles published between 1st January 2000 and 31st December 2015, human studies and English language. Duplicate and irrelevant studies were excluded from the final review. A total of 158 studies were included in the review. Studies were from diverse geographical locations, most of the studies were from Nigeria 16 (10.1%) followed by India 10 (6.3%) and Iran 8 (5%). Forty-three studies (27.2%) focused on antibiotic self-medication. Majority of the studies (106; 67%) were done with adult populations. The components addressed by the questionnaires covered: reasons for self-medications in 147 (93%) studies, purchasing source in 136 (86%) studies, medical conditions to be treated in 153 (96.8%) studies, adverse events in 67 (42.4%) studies, use of prescribing information in 24 (15.1%) studies and antibiotic resistance awareness in 20 (46.5%) antibiotic studies. For 74 (46.8%) studies, survey questionnaires were self-administered and most studies (57; 36%) were done at homes of respondents. Thirty-seven (23.4%) studies did not report any recall period for self-medication practices. Study response rates varied from 17.9% to 100%, and while validity of the study questionnaire was reported for 100 (63.3%) studies, 15 (9.5%) studies reported reliability test of the study questionnaire. There is a large variety of questionnaires being used for investigating self-medication practices making comparability and meta-analyses very difficult. It is desirable to have a basic set of standardized survey questions on this topic to make available for future research groups in this field.
During the European debt crisis, German and Greek media frequently reported on the political conflict between the two countries. This article examines to what extent the media coverage in one country about the other is considered by German and Greek citizens to be hostile (‘hostile media perception’) and influential (‘influence of presumed influence’). Data from a comparative survey in Germany (n = 492) and Greece (n = 484) show that news coverage by foreign media on the European debt crisis is perceived by respondents as hostile against their own country and as influential. Moreover, both media-related perceptions are linked with intensified perceptions of hostility, such as assumptions that an individual’s country is not respected in the other country or that the other country’s citizens are demanding that the individual’s country be punished. Based on these results, it is discussed whether media-related perceptions can have a conflict-intensifying effect in international crises.