Rheumatic? Questionnaire: 31,457 Responses on Musculoskeletal Symptoms and Attrition

Floor Dijkstra Zegers published a case study on May 8, 2026, analyzing attrition and representativeness in online symptom checker data. The dataset comprises 31,457 responses to the Dutch Rheumatic? Questionnaire on musculoskeletal complaints, with 15,591 follow-up survey responses. It compares participant characteristics across recruitment sources and with external target populations.

Use Cases

• Analyzing recruitment source bias based on comparisons between primary care, secondary care, and online recruitment.
• Studying attrition patterns by comparing characteristics of follow-up survey responders and non-responders.
• Assessing representativeness of symptom checker data by comparing sex, age, and BMI distributions to external target populations.
• Investigating symptom presentation variations across different participant demographics mentioned in the description.

Strengths

• Contains 31,457 baseline responses, providing a substantial sample size for analysis.
• Includes 15,591 follow-up survey responses, enabling attrition studies.
• Compares data to external target populations, offering a benchmark for representativeness.
• Explicitly analyzes bias across multiple recruitment sources (healthcare settings vs. social media).

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count for specific subgroups is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Data is contained within a PDF file (536.4 KB), which may require extraction to a structured format for analysis.

Provenance

Source

Floor Dijkstra Zegers via figshare

Collection Method

Data from the online Dutch Rheumatic? Questionnaire on musculoskeletal complaints, with comparisons to external population data.

Time Range

null

Freshness

Last updated 2026-05-08 05:40:34; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Netherlands