Organizing and Ranking Available Exposure Information

When preparing to conduct an exposure reconstruction, data organization is critical, particularly for reconstructions that potentially involve hundreds or perhaps 

Approaches using exposure zones defined by a combination of job title and work location have also been employed (Com and Esmen 1979 Panko et al. 2009 Stewart et al. 1998). The use of exposure zones rather than the more traditional task-based exposure classification has been shown to be a statistically valid method of classification (Smith et al. 1997). Exposure zones, rather than job titles, have also been used to estimate noise exposures (Burgess et al. 2004). There can be a trade-off between using broader exposure classes—which reduces misclassification but results in poorer resolution between exposure distributions—and using narrower exposure classes, in which the opposite effect occurs (Esmen et al. 2007c). 

The available data and information to be used in the reconstruction should be ranked from most to least robust. This step is one of the most important in the process, because once a full understanding of the available information is achieved, a strategy can be developed to generate the most appropriate reconstructed values. For a majority of scenarios, quantitative data will be most important and relevant to the assessment, followed by semiquantitative data or estimates, and finally, qualitative data, information, or estimates. 

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