title: Reliability of data on smoking habit and coffee drinking collected by personal interview in a hospital-based case-control study.
abstract: A study on the reliability of information on smoking habits and coffee drinking collected via interview was conducted among 500 subjects enrolled in a case-control study on bladder cancer in Brescia, North Italy. A total of 215 cases (incident and prevalent) and 285 controls were interviewed personally in the hospital setting by a first interviewer, and then re-interviewed by telephone by either the same interviewer or another one. Agreement between the first and second interview was evaluated using the kappa statistic and the intra-class correlation coefficient and via multiple logistic regression modelling. No important differences in reliability were found according to sex, education or case/control status, while agreement was better among subjects below 65 than among older ones, and among incident than prevalent cases. A slightly better agreement was found among subjects interviewed twice by the same interviewer than those interviewed by two different individuals, which may reflect the presence of inter-observer reliability for the latter. Overall, these results show a very high reliability of data on smoking and a fairly high reliability regarding coffee drinking as collected through face-to-face interviews.
authors.affiliation: Institute of Hygiene, University of Brescia, Italy. nardi@master.cci.unibs.it
authors.forename: F
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Donato
authors.forename: P
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Boffetta
authors.forename: R
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Fazioli
authors.forename: U
authors.initials: U
authors.lastname: Gelatti
authors.forename: S
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Porru
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D016022:Case-Control Studies; D003069:Coffee; D016001:Confidence Intervals; D004327:Drinking Behavior; D005069:Evaluation Studies as Topic; D005260:Female; D005500:Follow-Up Studies; D006801:Humans; D007407:Interviews as Topic / Q000592:standards*; D007558:Italy / Q000453:epidemiology; D016015:Logistic Models; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D015588:Observer Variation; D016017:Odds Ratio; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012494:Sampling Studies; D012907:Smoking / Q000453:epidemiology*; D013689:Telephone; D001749:Urinary Bladder Neoplasms / Q000453:epidemiology*
chemical_list: D003069:Coffee