Alvaro Alonso, MD, MPH¹, Cristina Rubio, MD¹, Sara Laguna¹, and Maria Segui-Gomez, MD, ScD, MPH². (1) Department of Preventive Medicine and Public Health, University of Navarra, Irunlarrea, 1, Pamplona, 31008, Spain, +34 948 42 56 00, aalogut@alumni.unav.es, (2) Johns Hopkins Center for Injury Research & Policy, 624 N. Broadway, 5th Floor, Baltimore, MD 21205-1996

Purpose: To assess the reproducibility of road injuries and mileage as reported through a mailed questionnaire in the SUN (Seguimiento Universidad de Navarra) Cohort Study.

Methods: The SUN is an open-enrollment cohort study with 13,500 graduates followed through biennial mailed questionnaires. One objective is to assess risk factors for road injuries. Information about previous road injuries and mileage was gathered both at baseline and first 2-year follow-up. To evaluate the reproducibility of these variables, a telephone survey was conducted among 528 subjects, including all 12 who had responded affirmatively to the question of incident hospitalization and a random sample of those who had not done so. Three trained female interviewers blinded to the subjects’ responses conducted the interviews. Reproducibility was calculated using correlation coefficients for mileage and kappa statistic for injuries.

Results: Participation rate was 90.2%. From 12 self-reported injuries with hospitalization, 6 were confirmed through the telephone survey (positive predictive value 50%) whereas among those who did not report hospital admission due to injury, there were no telephone-based cases (negative predictive value 100%) --agreement between mailed and telephone surveys was fair (kappa 0.66, 95% CI 0.41-0.91). For injuries not requiring hospital admission, reproducibility was similar --kappa 0.64 (95% CI 0.57 - 0.71). Correlation between questionnaire and telephone kilometers driven on average during a year was good (rho 0.69, p<0.001).

Conclusions: This study suggests that road injuries and mileage reported through mailed questionnaires can be used in studying associations between road injuries and a variety of risk factors.

Learning Objectives:

• At the conclusion of the session, the participant in this session will be able to assess the reproducibility of a questionnaire gathering information about road injuries and mileage driven.

Keywords: Injury Risk, Methodology

Presenting author's disclosure statement:
I do not have any significant financial interest/arrangement or affiliation with any organization/institution whose products or services are being discussed in this session.