Flexible Frames and Control Sampling in Case-Control Studies

We propose two innovations in statistical sampling for controls to enable better design of population-based case-control studies. The main innovation leads to novel solutions, without using weights, of the difficult and long-standing problem of selecting a control from persons in a household. Another advance concerns the drawing (at the outset) of the households themselves and involves random-digit dialing with atypical use of list-assisted sampling. A common element throughout is that one capitalizes on flexibility (not broadly available in usual survey settings) in choosing the frame, which specifies the population of persons from which both cases and controls come.

[1]  D. Purdie.  Statistical Methods in Medical Research, 4th edn , 2003 .

[2]  M H Gail,et al.  Effects of cluster sampling on epidemiologic analysis in population-based case-control studies. , 1989, Biometrics.

[3]  J. Brick,et al.  BIAS IN LIST-ASSISTED TELEPHONE SAMPLES , 1995 .

[4]  P. Hartge,et al.  Random digit dialing in selecting a population-based control group. , 1984, American journal of epidemiology.

[5]  Nitin R. Patel,et al.  Exact logistic regression: theory and examples. , 1995, Statistics in medicine.

[6]  Jennifer L. Kelsey,et al.  Methods in Observational Epidemiology , 1986 .

[7]  T. P. Ryan,et al.  A Preliminary Investigation of Maximum Likelihood Logistic Regression versus Exact Logistic Regression , 2002 .

[8]  A. Agresti.  [A Survey of Exact Inference for Contingency Tables]: Rejoinder , 1992 .

[9]  Edward L. Korn,et al.  Examples of Differing Weighted and Unweighted Estimates from a Sample Survey , 1995 .

[10]  N. Breslow,et al.  Statistics in Epidemiology : The Case-Control Study , 2008 .

[11]  D. Hosmer,et al.  Applied Logistic Regression , 1991 .

[12]  David R. Cox,et al.  The Oxford Dictionary of Statistical Terms , 2006 .

[13]  Alastair Scott,et al.  Case–control studies with complex sampling , 2001 .

[14]  Robert M. Elashoff,et al.  Fast Computation of Exact Confidence Limits for the Common Odds Ratio in a Series of 2 × 2 Tables , 1991 .

[15]  Joseph Waksberg,et al.  Random Digit Dialing Sampling for Case–Control Studies , 2005 .

[16]  R. F. Potthoff.  Telephone sampling in epidemiologic research: to reap the benefits, avoid the pitfalls. , 1994, American journal of epidemiology.

[17]  Cyrus R. Mehta,et al.  Efficient Monte Carlo Methods for Conditional Logistic Regression , 2000 .

[18]  Ralph DiGaetano,et al.  Commentary: Trade-offs in the development of a sample design for case-control studies. , 2002, American journal of epidemiology.

[19]  Cyrus R. Mehta,et al.  Exact Inference for Categorical Data , 2005 .

[20]  E. Greenberg.  Random digit dialing for control selection. A review and a caution on its use in studies of childhood cancer. , 1990, American journal of epidemiology.

[21]  D. Brogan,et al.  Comparison of telephone sampling and area sampling: response rates and within-household coverage. , 2001, American journal of epidemiology.