Matters arising: methodological issues on evaluating agreement between medical students’ attitudes towards drugs/alcohol use during pregnancy by Cohen’s kappa analysis

Abstract

Background: The purpose of this article is to discuss the statistical methods for agreement analysis used in Richelle’s article (BMC Med Educ 22:335, 2022). The authors investigated the attitudes of final-year medical students regarding substance use during pregnancy and identified the factors that influence these attitudes. Methods: We found that Cohen’s kappa value for measuring the agreement between these medical students’ attitudes towards drugs/alcohol use during pregnancy was questionable. In addition, we recommend using weighted kappa instead of Cohen’s kappa for agreement analysis at the presence of three categories. Results: The agreement improved from “good” (Cohen’s kappa) to “very good” (weighted kappa) for medical students’ attitudes towards drugs/alcohol use during pregnancy. Conclusion: To conclude, we recognize that this does not significantly alter the conclusions of the Richelle et al. paper, but it is necessary to ensure that the appropriate statistical tools are used.