Comparison of self-reported and expert-observed physical activities at work in a general population
✍ Scribed by David L. Nordstrom; Robert A. Vierkant; Peter M. Layde; Michael J. Smith
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1998
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 96 KB
- Volume
- 34
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0271-3586
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Concerns about exposure assessment quality have impeded research to identify risk factors for ergonomic disorders. We compared self-reported and expert-observed estimates of work-related physical factors for participants in a study of carpal tunnel syndrome (CTS). We analyzed data from 61 subjects, including 28 CTS cases and 33 controls randomly sampled from a case-control study with 417 participants. For 11 posture and manual materials handling factors, the median difference in mean exposure between self-reported and expert-observed exposure at work was less than 1/2 hour a day. Measurements by the two methods in this study agreed more often than expected by chance (median kappa 0.31 in cases and 0.28 in controls). Kappa differed significantly by case-control status for two factors: bending at the waist (kappa 0.79 in cases versus 0.28 in controls, P ϭ 0.01) and twisting of the forearm (kappa 0.45 in cases versus Ϫ0.02 in controls, P ϭ 0.02). Although imperfect, exposure information collected from workers' self-reports is useful for many ergonomic epidemiology studies.