Inter-Rater Reliability of Ergonomic Risk Assessment Methods

Background: Musculoskeletal disorders are one of the most common occupational diseases, and in recent years, several methods have been developed to evaluate risk factors for these types of disorders. Methods: In this cross-sectional study, 40 tasks in small industries including carpentry, turning, welding, loading and unloading, and sewing were recorded with a video camera and in the second stage, the postures were reviewed and evaluated by six raters. In total, forty of the worst and most frequent postures were analyzed by self-raters and then, the same risk levels were determined for the six methods and analyzed with correlation and Kappa agreement coefficient tests using SPSS (version 19), and then they were compared with each other using the Intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC). Results: The results revealed the importance of Kappa Coefficient in which it shows the risk level of different method and specified pair method: OCRA/SI =0.25, OCRA/HAL=0.2, SI/HAL= 0.32, SI/ RULA= 0.33, REBA/OCRA = 0.4, QEC/SI= 0.27, QEC/ RULA= 0.23Inter-rater Reliability of the methods was found as follow:ICCOCRA=0.3, ICCSI= 0.67, ICCHAL= 0.8, ICCRULA= 0.85, ICCREBA=0.8, ICCQEC=0.972.Conclusions: The results showed that there was no complete agreement among the methods. This agreement among methods is evaluated from poor to good (0.2-0.4). The ICC showed high reliability in the methods except in the OCRA method.