Comparability of results obtained by two-week home maintained diarrhoeal calendar with two-week diarrhoeal recall.

Many community based studies of diarrhoea in the developing world employ face-to-face interviews to obtain diarrhoeal histories. An alternative recording device that preserved the accuracy but avoided the expense and time commitment of the interview would be extremely valuable. To evaluate the comparability of episodes of diarrhoea obtained from a home-maintained two-week calendar with those histories given in response to a two-week health recall interview in a largely uneducated population, we studied approximately 1500 families for six months in Dhaka, Bangladesh. The diarrhoea records obtained for children by the two methods were highly comparable (Kappa value 0.83). The comparability was not impaired either by lack of maternal education nor by increased numbers of children in the household. We conclude that the two-week home maintained diarrhoea calendar offers comparable results with the two-week recall and in certain situations could be a useful substitute.