Inter-rater agreement in assessing occupational exposure in a case-control study

Area of Science:

• Occupational Epidemiology
• Environmental Health
• Toxicology

Background:

• Identifying occupational carcinogens is crucial for epidemiologists.
• A novel case-control approach uses detailed job history for exposure assessment.
• This method involves subject interviews and expert translation of jobs into potential exposures.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the inter-rater agreement in retrospective occupational exposure assessment.
• To evaluate the reliability of a two-stage job history assessment process.
• To determine the validity of expert-based exposure identification in occupational epidemiology.

Main Methods:

• A case-control approach was employed, involving a two-stage exposure assessment.
• Subjects provided detailed lifetime job histories.
• Trained chemists and hygienists identified potential occupational exposures for each job.

Main Results:

• Six trials were conducted over four years with internal and external raters.
• Perfect agreement among raters ranged from 95% to 98%.
• Cohen's kappa values, indicating agreement beyond chance, ranged from 0.5 to 0.7, with higher values for internal-internal comparisons.

Conclusions:

• The study demonstrates a high degree of inter-rater agreement in retrospective occupational exposure assessment.
• These findings support the validity and reliability of the developed case-control approach.
• The method provides credible data for identifying workplace carcinogens and informing epidemiological studies.