Monday August 29, 2011, 16.00 – 17.00 hrs
Beyond the Case-Control Study
Professor Norman Breslow
Department of Biostatistics
University of Washington, USA
In a “nested” case-control or case-cohort study, cases and controls are sampled from a defined finite population such as a health maintenance organization. The case-control design is used to collect additional data, for example from biological assay of stored tissue, for an informative sample. Considerable existing information about the members of this finite population not sampled as cases or controls, however, is often ignored both in the design of the study and in the analysis of the resulting data. By viewing the problem as a survey statistician would, this talk explores ways of recovering information often neglected by epidemiologists. Statistical tools for survey statisticians now implemented in the freely available R statistical system facilitate this process.
