Agreement between questionnaire and medical records on some health and socioeconomic problems among poisoning cases

Cross-sectional sample of 100 poisoning cases consecutively admitted to the Hospital Pulau Pinang, Malaysia during the period from September 2003 to February 2004 were studied. Data on health and socioeconomic problems were collected both by self-administered questionnaire and from medical records. Agreement between the two sets of data was assessed by calculating the concordance rate, Kappa (k) and PABAK. McNemar statistic was used to test differences between categories.Data collected by questionnaire and medical records showed excellent agreement on the "marital status"; good agreements on "chronic illness", "psychiatric illness", and "previous history of poisoning"; and fair agreements on "at least one health problem", and "boy-girl friends problem". PABAK values suggest better agreements' measures.There were excellent to good agreements between questionnaire and medical records on the marital status and most of the health problems and fair to poor agreements on the majority of socioeconomic problems. The implications of those findings were discussed.The agreement between medical records and data collected by questionnaire has been evaluated extensively on various ailments and health conditions [1-8]. Those studies revealed wide variations in findings ranging from perfect agreements to almost no agreements [9,10]. Medical records have the limitations of being incomplete, missed, conflicting or irrelevant [11]. A record in one health setting does not cover all the information required by the investigator, and patients normally seek treatment from several clinicians. Moreover, medical records are not written for the purposes of the specific study. On the other hand, data collected by questionnaire is also fraught with other limitations such as denial, difficulties in retrieval, telescoping, hindsight, and other recalling problems [12].There are situations where researchers face the need to use data composed of information collected in part retrospectively (from med