Abstract

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine the reliability of a new 9-point Self-Assessment Skin Tone Palette (SASTP) for reporting skin color across different racial/ethnic groups and on sun-exposed and unexposed skin in comparison with the reliability of other sun sensitivity measures from the melanoma literature within a diverse population. Methods: We examined test-retest reliability (intramethod reliability) comparing the initial survey responses to responses of the repeat survey using simple Kappas for dichotomous categories, weighted Kappas for multiple categories and interclass correlation coefficient for 7 or more ordered categories. Results: The reliability of the 9-point SASTP has interclass correlation coefficients of 0.6–0.8 for categorizing skin color of the upper inner arm and the forearm on a repeat in-person survey and a repeat online survey, which was higher than reliability for tendency to sunburn, inability to tan and a subjective measure of skin color. Conclusions: Our study showed substantial reliability of the SASTP for measuring skin color of the upper-inner arm and the forearm. In particular, there was high reliability between the initial in-person SASTP and the online version of the SASTP, suggesting that the SASTP can be reliably used for online surveys for measuring skin color.