Association between culture and the preference for, and perceptions of, 11 routes of medicine administration: A survey in 21 countries and regions

doi:10.1016/j.rcsop.2023.100378

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Explor Res Clin Soc Pharm. 2023 Dec; 12: 100378.

Published online 2023 Nov 26. doi: 10.1016/j.rcsop.2023.100378

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This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Table 1

Demographics data.

Number of respondents	4435 (56% females; 44% males), aged 18 and 94 years old, with a median age of 32 years (IQR 25–48).
Method of survey	98% in-person, 2% online.
Number of respondents per country	mean = 211; mode = 200; median = 201; minimum of 66 in Hong Kong and maximum of 497 in Nigeria
Countries in the different culture clusters in the IW cultural map	African-Islamic: Tunisia, Ghana, Nigeria, Turkey, Ethiopia, Lebanon
	Latin America: Malta, Brazil
	English Speaking: Great Britain, United States
	South Asia: India
	Orthodox: Serbia, Romania
	Catholic Europe: Portugal, France
	Protestant Europe: Netherlands
	Confucian: Japan, Hong Kong, South Korea, China
	Baltic: Estonia
% of respondents who lived in the following culture clusters in the IW cultural map	Confucian: 15%
	Protestant Europe: 5%
	English Speaking: 9%
	Catholic Europe: 10%
	Orthodox: 9%
	Baltic: 5%
	South Asia: 5%
	Latin America: 10%
	African-Islamic: 33%
% of respondents who lived in countries with the following income levels (as defined by the World Bank)	low income:4%
	lower middle: 29%
	upper middle: 28%
	high income: 39%
% of respondents who lived in the following WHO Region	African: 20%
	Americas: 9%
	South East Asia: 5%
	European: 42%
	Eastern Mediterranean: 9%
	Western Pacific: 15%
Respondents' residence	16% in rural; 79% in urban areas
Respondents' ethnicity	40% European; 22% African; 13% Asian, 9% Arabian, 5% Chinese, 5% Korean, 5% Turkish, 2% Other, 0.7% Mixed, 0.1% Caribbean, 0.1% American.
Respondents' religion	None (24%), Christians (48%), Muslim (17%), Hindu (4%), Buddhist (4%), Other (1%), Traditional African (0.7%), Sikh (0.1%), Jewish (0.1%), Agnostic (0.1%), Spiritual (0.1%), Jain (0.02%)
Highest education level	56% had university or technical college qualifications, 26% had completed high school, 3% middle school, 6% primary school and 4% had no formal schooling.
Were respondents taking any medicine?	54% no; 45% yes
Participants' health	mean = 7.3 (with 10 being highest possible score)
Participants' religiosity	mean = 5.3 (with 10 being highest possible score)
Participants' wealth	1% very poor; 12% poor; 71% average; 13% rich; 2% very rich
Participants' occupation	Participants had a very large diversity of occupations, and although this was asked for, this item was excluded from data analysis due to the large diversity.
Missing data	3% for participants' responses about the routes of drug administration and 3% for covariates (participants' year of birth, gender, rural or urban residence, ethnicity, religion and how religious they were, highest education level, wealth, health and if they were taking any medicine.

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All denominations of a religion were grouped, for example, the 48% Christians include Protestants, Catholics, Orthodox Christians and any other denominations.