A well-structured English language questionnaire was developed and was also translated into Arabic, Urdu and Hindi languages.
The questionnaire consisted the anthropometric variables, cigarette smoking, occupation conditions, working exposure, any known history of present and past illness, exposure conditions during the working hours, and questions about musculoskeletal problems.
The co-authors informed the participants about the objectives of the study. Subjects were questioned about complaints of the musculoskeletal system.
The complaints score reflected the presence or absence of the symptoms. 540 questionnaires were distributed among them 389 (72.03%) participants completed and 151 (27.96%) either did not fully completed the questionnaire or were excluded from the study as per exclusion criteria. Finally, we included 389 apparently healthy, volunteer males with mean age 34.56±8.33 years (mean ± SD; range 22-54) years who had a working duration in building construction as 5.76±2.68 years (mean ± SD; range 1-12 years).