Participation bias in Psychosis

The primary aim of collecting anonymised information from CRIS is to permit exploration of systematic differences between participants and non participants who were invited to take part in the Physical Health and Substance Use in First Onset Psychosis (PUMP) study, so as to investigate potential non-participation bias among our sample. This is particularly important to establish as the presence of participation bias is known to affect the generalisability of the findings of the study. For example, if the sample of participants is found not to be representative of the target population then inferences cannot be drawn to the whole population of first onset psychosis patients’ and this will necessarily limit the translation of the research findings to the wider population, and may even invalidate our main findings.