Paper Survey Help Step 1

Help for Step 1 - Who did you meet?

Your questionnaire asks you about the people you meet on a particular day of the week, the next one following the day that you first received the survey pack in the post.

E.g. if your survey pack asks you to complete the questionnaire about the people you meet on a Monday, and you received your survey pack on a Wednesday, you should fill in information about the people you meet on the next Monday.

If you receive your pack on the same day of the week that your survey asks you about, you should complete it for that day of the week, the following week.

E.g. you receive the pack on a Friday, and it asks you about the people you meet on a Friday, you should fill in information about the people you meet on the following Friday in the next week.

We would like to know about all the people you met during that day, your contacts.

Who do I record?

We define someone as a contact if:

you have a face-to-face conversation with them, within 3 metres (10 feet) of each other, or
you touched their skin with your skin (e.g. handshake, kiss, play, some sports)

These are considered contacts:

A family member who you talked to at your home, while sitting on the sofa together, in the evening.
A colleague at work with whom you talked face-to-face sitting near each other for 30 minutes, spread over the work day.
You work in a supermarket at the check-out; there were 14 different customers whom you served individually, and you talked to each of them during the payment process.
You meet up with 4 friends for a game of football; you talk to each of them face-to-face at some point during your time together.

These are not:

You give a lecture to a large room full of people; during your presentation your audience is not closer than 3 meters to you.
You talk to a friend on the telephone but you did not physically meet them during the day.
You sit next to someone on the bus but do not speak with them and do not touch their skin with yours.

How do I record people on the sheet?

There are two ways to record a person you met:

You can add them as an 'Individual contact', with their own row

You can add them as a member of a 'Group of similar contacts'. In this case, please also let us know the number of people in the group.

Please, make sure you record a particular person on only one row: they should be either recorded as an individual or as a member of only one group.

More about Groups

If you meet lots of people during your day in a similar way you can record them all together as a group. We hope this will make it easier for some people, whose work or activities mean they meet a lot of different people in a day, to record their contacts.

How can I remember everyone I met?

It can be hard to recall everyone you met during a day, particularly if you’ve had a busy day. Also, it is easy to forget people that you may have met briefly or people that you don’t know very well.

For our study, it's important that you try to remember everyone you had contact with. One way to remember everyone you met is to reflect back on your day, thinking about what you did during your day and where you went.

Here are some general questions and hints to help you:

Who did you see at your home, both in the morning and evening?
Did you speak to anyone while commuting to, or from, work?
Who did you speak to at work? Did you meet anyone briefly, perhaps to say hello to each other? Which people did you have a conversation with, even if only briefly.
Don't assume that you spoke to everyone at your work; try to remember who you did and did not have a conversation with and whether you touched their skin.
Where did you go for lunch? Did you speak to anyone there?
Did you go shopping? Did you talk to any sales assistants or supermarket staff? What about other customers?
What did you do after work? Did you meet up with friends?
If you went to a pub or a restaurant, did you talk to any staff or customers? Did the people you were with also talk to them? Did you touch the skin of any of your friends, such as shaking their hands?
Did you play sport? How many people did you talk to, and did you touch their skin while playing sport?

Why do we ask about who you meet?

Many infections require what is called 'close-contact' between people to transmit. Very little is known about how many close-contact encounters we make in a day, or how many different people you would make a close-contact encounter with during that day. With your help we'll be able to put reliable numbers to these unknowns and be better able to say whether an infection could cause an epidemic in the UK.