Building a consensus for tomato worker ergonomics: A community-expert panel study

In participatory research partnerships with communities, academic researchers strive to recognize and give voice to laypeople with knowledge of health and the environment. Widely used in medical, drug and device research, expert panel studies have found limited use in industrial hygiene research. Here, the expert panel study methodology is adapted to serve as a consensus-building tool among persons of diverse educational and socioeconomic backgrounds in assessing ergonomic hazards during manual tomato harvesting and packing. In addition to nine health and safety professionals, six industry personnel, whose expertise derives from careers as managers or laborers on tomato farms, will be assembled as the “expert” panel. After a half-day training session by a certified ergonomist, the panel will use the Rapid Entire Body Assessment (REBA) method to rate video segments of tomato harvesting and packing tasks with respect to ergonomic hazards. Intra- and interclass statistical methods will be used to estimate the extent to which raters agree on the major body parts at risk of chronic musculoskeletal injury. If ratings assigned by industry personnel correlate with those of health professionals, this will form the basis of a community consensus for practical intervention research and action. If the two groups diverge in their ratings, then qualitative research methods will be used to ascertain the sources of variability. In either case, by providing “seats at the table” for community experts in a formal study that sets the agenda for future work, the university research team expects to strengthen its relationships with community partners.