What do measures of agreement (κ) tell us about quality of exposure assessment? Theoretical analysis and numerical simulation.

ABSTRACT:

Background

The reliability of binary exposure classification methods is routinely reported in occupational health literature because it is viewed as an important component of evaluating the trustworthiness of the exposure assessment by experts. The Kappa statistics (κ) are typically employed to assess how well raters or classification systems agree in a variety of contexts, such as identifying exposed participants in a population-based epidemiological study of risks due to occupational exposures. However, the question we are really interested in is not so much the reliability of an exposure assessment method, although this holds value in itself, but the validity of the exposure estimates. The validity of binary classifiers can be expressed as a method's sensitivity (SN) and specifi

SUBMITTER: Burstyn I 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3855494 | biostudies-literature | 2013 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature