Cost-efficient case-control cluster sampling designs for population-based epidemiological studies

Publication date: August 2018Source: Spatial and Spatio-temporal Epidemiology, Volume 26Author(s): Thomas Ly, Myles Cockburn, Bryan LangholzAbstractCost-efficient sampling schemes for population-based case-control studies are necessary for sampling subjects in geographically dispersed populations where in-house surveys are expensive to conduct due to high interviewer travel costs that may be associated with simple random sampling. Motivated by the original study conducted by Cockburn et al. (2011) that investigated the relationship between exposure to pesticides and prostate carcinogenesis, a set of cluster-based individually matched case-control designs is presented for cost-efficient sampling of additional controls. Based on cluster sampling from the field of survey sampling, the case-control study designs presented, where one case is individually matched to three controls, use case-control status in the sampling of the primary sampling clusters. In the secondary stage, interviewer travel costs are reduced by subsampling additional controls within primary sampling clusters as opposed to selecting additional controls purely at random, which would be highly inefficient from a cost perspective. Compared to the simple random sampling (SRS) 1:1 and SRS 1:3 (one case matched to: n SRS control(s)) designs, computer simulations demonstrate that these cluster-based designs provide unbiased rate ratio estimation and statistical efficiencies that are no worse than the SRS 1:1 design ...

Source: Spatial and Spatio-temporal Epidemiology - July 11, 2018 Category: Epidemiology Source Type: research