Decision-theoretic recruitment and validation planning for depression surveys: An illustrative Chinese application

Han Liu

PLOS ONE, 2026, vol. 21, issue 10, 1-17

Abstract: Background: Survey planning must balance recruitment losses against uncertainty in screening yield, diagnostic accuracy and survey design. This study examined how these considerations determine invitation requirements and diagnostic-validation allocation. Methods: A Beta planning distribution used 170 PHQ-9-positive results among 1,045 Chinese community participants and an effective sample size of 100. Asymmetric recruitment loss selected conditional and joint-distribution invitation targets. A separate cost-plus-variance Bayes criterion jointly allocated survey clusters and independent reference-positive and reference-negative validation samples. Parameter uncertainty and future-data performance were evaluated by integration and simulation. Results: With an illustrative underplanning-to-overplanning loss ratio of 3, conditional planning selected a screening-positive proportion of 0.1862 and 4,794 screening invitations. Integrating design uncertainty increased this target to 5,346. Current-prevalence planning required 9,247 conditional invitations or 11,866 under joint parameter uncertainty when diagnostic accuracy was known within each scenario. The original validation sample imposed a reference-point half-width floor of 0.0292, exceeding the 0.020 target. Under specified relative costs, the joint allocation used 21,708 invitations and 240/4,538 reference-positive/reference-negative validation participants. Its prior-predictive width attainment was 53.15%, compared with 0.03% when nearly the same budget retained the original validation sample. Increasing the precision valuation fourfold raised attainment to 10,000/10,000 simulations, with 95.31% coverage. Uncorrected specificity shifts produced substantial bias despite larger samples. Conclusions: At k = 3, the loss-based rule selected a screening-positive planning proportion of 0.1862, reducing conditional invitation requirements by 39.38% relative to p = 0.5. Joint survey–validation allocation improved simulated precision at comparable assumed cost. These findings support allocating recruitment and diagnostic-validation resources jointly when planning current-prevalence surveys.

Date: 2026
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0359867

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0359867

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