Development and validation of a web-based questionnaire for surveying the health and working conditions of high-performance marine craft populations

Abstract

BackgroundHigh-performance marine craft crews are susceptible to various adverse health conditions caused by multiple interactive factors. However, there are limited epidemiological data available for assessment of working conditions at sea. Although questionnaire surveys are widely used for identifying exposures, outcomes and associated risks with high accuracy levels, until now, no validated epidemiological tool exists for surveying occupational health and performance in these populations.AimTo develop and validate a web-based questionnaire for epidemiological assessment of occupational and individual risk exposure pertinent to the musculoskeletal health conditions and performance in high-performance marine craft populations.MethodA questionnaire for investigating the association between work-related exposure, performance and health was initially developed by a consensus panel under four subdomains, viz. demography, lifestyle, work exposure and health and systematically validated by expert raters for content relevance and simplicity in three consecutive stages, each iteratively followed by a consensus panel revision. The item content validity index (I-CVI) was determined as the proportion of experts giving a rating of 3 or 4. The scale content validity index (S-CVI/Ave) was computed by averaging the I-CVIs for the assessment of the questionnaire as a tool. Finally, the questionnaire was pilot tested.ResultsThe S-CVI/Ave increased from 0.89 to 0.96 for relevance and from 0.76 to 0.94 for simplicity, resulting in 36 items in the final questionnaire. The pilot test confirmed the feasibility of the questionnaire.ConclusionsThe present study shows that the web-based questionnaire fulfils previously published validity acceptance criteria and is therefore considered valid and feasible for the empirical surveying of epidemiological aspects among high-performance marine craft crews and similar populations.

Validation of a Questionnaire Developed to Evaluate a Pediatric eHealth Website for Parents

“…The development of a valid and reliable assessment tool is not a trivial task [18]. Therefore, after studying other research in different medical ambits [16,17,19,23], an evaluation of the content validity and the psychometric reliability of the questionnaire was performed. The most important aspect of this research is that, as far as the authors know, this could be the first study to develop and test a website questionnaire to evaluate a pediatric website for parents.…”

“…In our case, the I-CVI was a slightly more conservative indicator of expert consensus than described by other authors [16,19] because the survey tool utilized for the ratings of our questionnaire used a five-point scale rather than a four-point scale, with the aim of minimizing selection bias.…”

“…Our website and our questionnaire were developed in Spanish, and we cannot infer that our conclusions are applicable to other languages [22]. Content validity evaluation is a subjective procedure [35], and every expert could not represent all the dimensions of the content domain [19]. Our questionnaire has not been validated in other web pages of the same type, and this could reduce the external validity of the results obtained.…”

“…Seven experts were recruited from different geographic locations of Spain. They were representative samples of the content domains of the questionnaire [19]. They were asked to evaluate both the website and the questionnaire, using a scale of 1 to 5 points to evaluate the core dimensions.…”

Construction of a web-based questionnaire for longitudinal investigation of work exposure, musculoskeletal pain and performance impairments in high-performance marine craft populations

“…Our group recently developed a comprehensive questionnaire that samples information on marine personnel and their working environment, and enables the prevalence of adverse health and performance effects and their association with work exposure to be quantified. 18 …”