University of Queensland, Herston Road, Herston, Brisbane, QLD 4006, Australia.
J Clin Epidemiol. 2012 Sep;65(9):934-9. doi: 10.1016/j.jclinepi.2011.11.014. Epub 2012 Jun 27.
In the course of performing systematic reviews on the prevalence of low back and neck pain, we required a tool to assess the risk of study bias. Our objectives were to (1) modify an existing checklist and (2) test the final tool for interrater agreement.
The final tool consists of 10 items addressing four domains of bias plus a summary risk of bias assessment. Two researchers tested the interrater agreement of the tool by independently assessing 54 randomly selected studies. Interrater agreement overall and for each individual item was assessed using the proportion of agreement and Kappa statistic.
Raters found the tool easy to use, and there was high interrater agreement: overall agreement was 91% and the Kappa statistic was 0.82 (95% confidence interval: 0.76, 0.86). Agreement was almost perfect for the individual items on the tool and moderate for the summary assessment.
We have addressed a research gap by modifying and testing a tool to assess risk of study bias. Further research may be useful for assessing the applicability of the tool across different conditions.
在进行关于腰背和颈部疼痛的患病率的系统评价过程中，我们需要一种工具来评估研究偏倚的风险。我们的目标是：(1) 修改现有的清单；(2) 测试最终工具的组内一致性。
最终的工具由 10 个项目组成，涵盖了偏倚的四个领域，以及一个偏倚风险的总结评估。两位研究人员通过独立评估 54 篇随机选择的研究来测试工具的组内一致性。使用一致性比例和 Kappa 统计量评估整体和每个项目的组内一致性。
评估者发现该工具易于使用，并且具有很高的组内一致性：整体一致性为 91%，Kappa 统计量为 0.82（95%置信区间：0.76，0.86）。工具的各个项目的一致性几乎是完美的，而对总结评估的一致性是适度的。
我们通过修改和测试一种评估研究偏倚风险的工具来解决了一个研究空白。进一步的研究可能有助于评估该工具在不同情况下的适用性。
