文章基本信息

标题：Occupational Health of Southeast Asian Immigrants in a US City: A Comparison of Data Sources
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作者：Lenore S. Azaroff ; Charles Levenstein ; David H. Wegman 等
期刊名称：American journal of public health
印刷版ISSN：0090-0036
出版年度：2003
卷号：93
期号：4
页码：593-598
语种：English
出版社：American Public Health Association
摘要：Objectives . This study sought to characterize occupational injury and illness cases identified through 3 different sources of data on a population of immigrant workers. Methods . Participants were Cambodian and Lao workers living in Lowell, Mass. A household survey allowed comparisons between characteristics of work-related cases documented in workers’ compensation wage replacement records and hospital records and characteristics of self-reported cases. Results . The household survey captured types of cases missing from existing data, particularly illnesses self-reported to be associated with chemical exposures. Injuries and illnesses affecting the study population appeared to be significantly underrepresented in workers’ compensation wage replacement data. Conclusions . Community-based methods can supplement available occupational health data sources. The United States lacks a comprehensive occupational health surveillance system. Researchers rely on data collection systems not designed for this purpose, and these systems notoriously fail to capture most work-related illnesses and many work-related injuries, especially those affecting low-wage, immigrant, and contingent workers. 1– 14 It is therefore important to characterize the types of information typically captured or missed by existing data collection systems. In the present study, we used an original household survey to identify the types of occupational health problems self-reported by Southeast Asian immigrants in Lowell, Mass, and to describe the differences between cases reported in the survey and those found in the other information sources that were available: workers’ compensation records for cases involving 5 or more lost workdays and records from one of the city’s hospitals. We examined the data sets to determine differences among them that might result from the fact that the systems are designed to capture different types of information and differences that appear to result from a failure to capture the cases they are designed to document.