Occupational Medicine & Health Affairs
Open Access

Research Article

The investigation of intra-rater and inter-rater agreement in Assessment of Repetitive Task (ART) as an ergonomic method

¹MS in Occupational Health Engineering, Occupational Health Department, Health School, Bam University of Medical Sciences, Bam, Iran

²Research Center for Health Sciences, Shiraz University of Medical Sciences, Shiraz, Iran

³MS in Occupational Health Engineering, A Member of Student Research Committee Health Department, Kerman University of Medical Sciences, Kerman, Iran

*Corresponding Author:

Vafa Feyzi
MS in occupational health engineering
a member of student research committee health department
Kerman University of Medical Sciences, Kerman, Iran
Tel: +98 3433205111
Fax: +98 341 231 585
E-mail: vafa.faizi@yahoo.com

Received date: September 20, 2015; Accepted date: September 29, 2015; Published daet: October 06, 2015

Citation: Roodbandi AJ, Choobineh A, Feyzi V (2015) The Investigation of Intrarater and Inter-rater Agreement in Assessment of Repetitive Task (ART) as an Ergonomic Method. Occup Med Health Aff 3:217. doi: 10.4172/2329-6879.1000217

Copyright: © 2015 Roodbandi AJ, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Introduction: Intra-rater and inter-rater assessment is a reliable method to determine the correlation between various observation results made by the same rater and between the observations of a rater and his/her colleagues. This study was intended to investigate intra-rater and inter-rater agreement in ART method, which is an ergonomic method to assess repetitive tasks. Methodology: This cross-sectional study was conducted in 2015 to assess body postures of 14 tasks in marquetry work via ART posture analysis method. Data were analyzed using SPSS 11 and Excel software. Results: For rater 1, ICC was 0.84 and for rater 2, it was 0.99. Inter-rater ICC value in the first assessment was 0.87 and in the second one, after a week, was 0.75. The results revealed that intra-rater agreement for rater 2 was better than that for rater 1 and inter-rater agreement was acceptable according to the ICC values. Discussion and conclusion: According to the research results, there was a relatively appropriate correlation for inter-raters and intra-raters in ART method. In order to improve intra-rater and inter-rater agreement, it is recommended that the assessment take place with both raters present in workplace and in addition to applying direct observational techniques, the body postures of the subjects be photographed while doing the tasks.

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