In establishing a cohort of U.S. nurses, an assessment of response bias was made comparing respondents and non-respondents with regard to age, education, state of residence, employment status, field of employment, and major specialty. Overall, the 122,328 respondents (69.7 per cent) and 43,222 non-respondents were quite similar. Together with the reasonable response rate in a homogeneous population, this suggests that estimation of exposure-disease associations is unlikely to be affected by major bias due to non-response. (Am J Public Health 1980; 70:823-825).

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