@article{oai:repo.qst.go.jp:00048219,
 author = {石川, 徹夫 and 赤羽, 恵一 and 米内, 俊祐 and 栗原, 治 and al., et and 石川 徹夫 and 赤羽 恵一 and 米内 俊祐 and 栗原 治},
 issue = {3},
 journal = {Journal of Radiological Protection},
 month = {Mar},
 note = {After the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plant accident, the Fukushima Health Management Survey (FHMS) was launched. The Basic Survey, a component of FHMS, is a questionnaire used to survey residents across the Fukushima Prefecture about their behavior in the first 4 months after the accident. The questionnaire findings are used to determine individual external doses by linking behavior data to a computer program with daily gamma ray dose rate maps, drawn after the accident. Through June 30, 2015, the response rate was only 27.2% (558,550 population), indicating that the findings might not be generalizable because of poor representativeness of the population. The objective of this study was to clarify if the data from the FHMS Basic Survey were representative of the entire population, by conducting a new survey to compare the external doses between non-respondents and respondents in the previous survey.
A total of 5350 subjects were randomly selected from 7 local regions of Fukushima Prefecture. An interview survey was conducted with the non-respondents to the FHMS Basic Survey. A total of 990 responses were obtained from the previous non-responders by interview survey. For the regions Kempoku, Kenchu, Kennan, Aizu, Minami-Aizu, Soso, and Iwaki, differences in mean effective dose (95% confidence interval) in mSv between the non-responders and previous responders were 0.12 (0.01-0.23), -0.09 (-0.21-0.03), -0.06 (-0.18-0.07), 0.05 (-0.04-0.14), 0.01 (-0.01-0.02), 0.09 (0.01-0.17), 0.09 (0.00-0.17), respectively. The differences fall neither within the interval (-∞, -0.25) nor within the interval (0.25, ∞). These findings imply that mean effective doses between the previous and new respondents were not different, with a significantly indifferent region of 0.25 mSv according to equivalence tests. The present study indicates that the dose distribution obtained from about one-quarter of Fukushima residents represents the dose distribution for the entire Fukushima Prefecture.},
 pages = {584--605},
 title = {Representativeness of individual external doses estimated for one quarter of residents in the Fukushima Prefecture after the nuclear disaster: The Fukushima Health Management Survey},
 volume = {37},
 year = {2017}
}