Effects on the estimated cause-specific mortality fraction of providing physician reviewers with different formats of verbal autopsy data

Table 1 Kappa statistics describing constancy of individual cause of death assignments between different data formats presented to the physician coders

Cause of death (number of deaths)	Kappa statistics (95% confidence interval)
	Structured vs. combined format	Unstructured vs. combined format	Structured vs. unstructured
Circulatory (487)	0.71 (0.67 - 0.75)	0.70 (0.66 - 0.74)	0.57 (0.52 - 0.61)
Injury (187)	0.81 (0.76 - 0.86)	0.77 (0.72 - 0.82)	0.74 (0.68 - 0.79)
Infectious (134)	0.75 (0.69 - 0.80)	0.70 (0.63 - 0.76)	0.65 (0.58 - 0.72)
Neoplasm (139)	0.83 (0.78 - 0.88)	0.79 (0.73 - 0.84)	0.76 (0.70 - 0.82)
Respiratory (61)	0.57 (0.47 - 0.67)	0.57 (0.47 - 0.68)	0.48 (0.38 - 0.58)
Digestive (43)	0.38 (0.24 - 0.51)	0.52 (0.40 - 0.65)	0.36 (0.23 - 0.50)
Genitourinary (42)	0.53 (0.40 - 0.66)	0.61 (0.48 - 0.74)	0.36 (0.22 - 0.50)
Endocrine (31)	0.53 (0.37 - 0.69)	0.55 (0.40 - 0.70)	0.31 (0.15 - 0.48)
Nervous (23)	0.61 (0.44 - 0.77)	0.63 (0.46 - 0.80)	0.37 (0.19 - 0.55)
Mental (16)	0.62 (0.42 - 0.82)	0.46 (0.22 - 0.70)	0.53 (0.30 - 0.77)
Perinatal (14)	0.83 (0.68 - 0.98)	0.66 (0.44 - 0.88)	0.48 (0.23 - 0.72)
Pregnancy^# (4)
Blood^# (3)
Congenital^# (3)
Skin^# (3)
Unclassified (217)	0.44 (0.38 - 0.50)	0.40 (0.34 - 0.46)	0.31 (0.25 - 0.37)
Overall (1407)	0.66 (0.63 - 0.68)	0.64 (0.61 - 0.67)	0.53 (0.50 - 0.56)

*A kappa statistic of 0.75 or above is generally considered to reflect a high correlation, 0.40 - 0.75 a moderate correlation, and below 0.40 a poor correlation [21]. ^#No kappa coefficient was calculated because there were too few deaths were recorded to allow informative estimates to be obtained.

ISSN: 1478-7954