Agreement in reporting of asthma by parents or offspring - the RHINESSA generation study

• Main Authors: Kuiper, Ingrid Nordeide, Svanes, Cecilie, Benediktsdóttir, Bryndís, Bertelsen, Randi Jacobsen, Bråbäck, Lennart, Dharmage, Shyamali C, Holm, Mathias, Janson, Christer, Jõgi, Rain, Malinovschi, Andrei, Matheson, Melanie, Moratalla, Jesús Martínez, Gomez Real, Francisco, Sánchez-Ramos, José Luis, Schlünssen, Vivi, Timm, Signe, Johannessen, Ane
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Agreement; Asthma; Questionnaire; Self-report; Transgenerational; Validation

Background: Self-report questionnaires are commonly used in epidemiology, but may be susceptible to misclassification, especially if answers are given on behalf of others, e.g. children or parents. The aim was to determine agreement and analyse predictors of disagreement in parents’ reports of offspring asthma, and in offspring reports of parents’ asthma. Methods: In the Respiratory Health in Northern Europe, Spain and Australia (RHINESSA) generation study, 6752 offspring (age range 18–51 years) and their parents (age range 39–66 years) reported their own and each other’s asthma status. Agreement between asthma reports from offspring and parents was determined by calculating sensitivity, specificity, positive and negative predictive value and Cohen’s kappa. The participants’ own answers regarding themselves were defined as the gold standard. To investigate predictors for disagreement logistic regression analyses were performed to obtain odds ratios (OR) with 95% confidence intervals (CI) for sex, smoking status, education, comorbidity and severity of asthma. Results: Agreement was good for parental report of offspring early onset asthma (