4.2 Strengths and limitations
It is essential to highlight the strengths of this cross-sectional
survey. Firstly, many respondents with a range of olfactory disorders
participated in this survey shedding light on the impact of olfactory
disorders on personal health and safety. Secondly, this survey
quantified the occurrence of safety scares/incidents in the preceding 5
years allowing qualitative data to be collected detailing such events.
Lastly, data were collected anonymously allowing respondents to give
honest accounts of their experiences.
However, there are important limitations with this study. Firstly, the
major limitation is selection bias of this study as aforementioned. The
gender distribution is heavily skewed towards females, and the aetiology
of olfactory dysfunction within our population group is different from
less biased retrospective studies . This could be because individuals
with limited treatment options, such as idiopathic and congenital
olfactory dysfunction, seek help from charities and support groups more
compared to individuals with e.g. sino-nasal olfactory dysfunction which
has more treatment options. In addition, approximately half of the
respondents have lived with olfactory dysfunction for more than 5 years,
allowing them more time to set mitigations to reduce hazardous events.
This may underestimate the 5-year incidence rate. Secondly, all
responses were self-reported, including the aetiology of olfactory
dysfunction, number of hazardous events, and the details of how the
events manifested. These could introduce bias and inaccuracies due to
forgetfulness, misunderstanding of questions, or intentional
misrepresentation. Thirdly, this survey may be prone to non-response
bias, and the response rate is unknown. There might be a non-response
bias, i.e., the views of those who did not respond might systematically
differ from those who did. Lastly, a subgroup analysis was not conducted
to determine which specific demographic groups might be at a higher risk
to hazardous events.