The health care burden associated with childhood injury is huge. Surveillance--the collection, analysis, interpretation, and dissemination of data--is seen as an important step towards understanding and controlling the injury problem. The usefulness of surveillance data, however, depends on their quality. Quality may be defined as the collection of reliable and valid data along with an unbiased capture of events. (An important issue in paediatric injury surveillance is that proxy respondents are often used to provide data on behalf of the child.) Previous evaluations of paediatric injury surveillance data, however, have not directly estimated the reliability and validity of proxy respondent information nor assessed the relative importance of factors associated with system capture. / Given these gaps in knowledge, this thesis examines the reliability and validity of proxy respondent information on childhood injuries. In addition, the importance of precise definition of the surveillance population of interest is described, along with identification of factors associated with failure of injury capture by a national paediatric injury surveillance system. The sensitivity, specificity, and representativeness of injury capture by this system is estimated for three different, but not mutually exclusive, populations of childhood injury. / The results from the proxy respondent studies provide important information on the utility of proxy data on childhood injury, while the studies on injury capture highlight the influence of process and health services utilization on surveillance system function. The implications of these findings for researchers and policy makers are discussed, with examination of the cautions necessary when drawing inferences from surveillance data.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.40187 |
| Date | January 1996 |
| Creators | MacArthur, Colin. |
| Contributors | Pless, I. B. (advisor) |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Doctor of Philosophy (Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001496083, proquestno: NN12425, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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