Sample Strategy

Participants were recruited through neighborhood primary care center registers at Tirana, Manizales and Natal. At these sites a random sample of elderly people registered at the health centers was drawn and participants were approached directly by our interviewers to invite them to participate in the study. In Kingston and Saint-Hyacinthe, participants received a letter from their primary care doctors inviting them to contact our field coordinator to make an appointment for the home visits. In choosing the study neighborhoods we purposefully avoided the extremes of the socioeconomic spectrum: the wealthy and the very poor areas.