Reliability of demographic, smoking and occupational data provided by mothers vs. fathers in a childhood cancer study

A large case-control study of children was used to test mothers' reporting of information on fathers' background, lifestyle and occupational factors. For a subset (104) of 1341 enrolled families, both parents were interviewed about fathers' characteristics. Reliability of reporting was determined fo r fathers' race, education, smoking status, non-recent job history and use of occupational agents. The ability of mothers to report fathers' race, edu cation and smoking status was high (kappa > 0.70). Mothers were generally a ble to report jobs held by the fathers in the 5 years preceding the birth o f the child, but reliability was higher for jobs held for longer (kappa typ ically above 0.70), rather than shorter periods (kappa above 0.40). The fin ding that mothers' reporting on fathers' background, lifestyle and non-rece nt job history was reliable is encouraging, because many studies on childho od health rely exclusively on information from interviews with mothers. How ever, mothers were not reliably able to describe exposure to specific occup ational agents.