Systematically extracting metal- and solvent-related occupational information from free-text responses to lifetime occupational history questionnaires.

ABSTRACT:

Objectives

Lifetime occupational history (OH) questionnaires often use open-ended questions to capture detailed information about study participants' jobs. Exposure assessors use this information, along with responses to job- and industry-specific questionnaires, to assign exposure estimates on a job-by-job basis. An alternative approach is to use information from the OH responses and the job- and industry-specific questionnaires to develop programmable decision rules for assigning exposures. As a first step in this process, we developed a systematic approach to extract the free-text OH responses and convert them into standardized variables that represented exposure scenarios.

Methods

Our study population comprised 2408 subjects, reporting 11991 jobs, from a case-control stu

SUBMITTER: Friesen MC 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4053931 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature