Abstract
When planning a research project an epidemiologist must consider how many subjects should be studied. While factors such as available budget certainly present constraints on the maximum-number of subjects that might actually be included in a study, statistical considerations are extremely important. To address the statistical questions about appropriate sample size, the researcher must first specify the study design, the nature of the outcome variable, the aims of the study, the planned analysis method, and the expected results of the study. Is the goal of the study to distinguish between hypotheses about the value of a parameter or function of parameters, or is the goal to provide a confidence interval estimate of a parameter such as the odds ratio or relative risk?
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Chernick MR, Liu CY (2002) The saw-toothed behavior of power versus sample size and software solutions: single binomial proportion using exact methods. The American Statistician 56:149–155
Dixon WJ, Massey FJ (1983) Introduction to statistical analysis. 4th edn. McGraw-Hill, New York
Elashoff JD (2005) nQuery Advisor® Release 6. Statistical Solutions, Ireland
Fleiss JL (1981) Statistical methods for rates and proportions. 2nd edn. Wiley, New York
Fleiss JL, Tytun A, Ury SH (1980) A simple approximation for calculating sample sizes for comparing independent proportions. Biometrics 36:343–346
Hettmansperger TP (1984) Statistical inference based on ranks. Wiley, New York
Hosmer DW, Lemeshow S (2000) Applied logistic regression. 2nd edn. Wiley, New York
Hsieh FY (1989) Sample size tables for logistic regression. Statistics in Medicine 8:795–802
Hsieh FY, Bloch DA, Larsen MD (1998) A simple method of sample size calculation for linear and logistic regression. Statistics in Medicine 17:1623–1634
Korn EL (1986) Sample size tables for bounding small proportions. Biometrics 42:213–216
Kupper LL, Hafner KB (1989) How appropriate are popular sample size formulas? The American Statistician 43:101–105
Lachin JM (1981) Introduction to sample size determination and power analysis for clinical trials. Controlled Clinical Trials 2:93–113
Lachin JM (1992) Power and sample size evaluation for the McNemar test with application to matched case-control studies. Statistics in Medicine 11:1239–1251
Lemeshow S, Hosmer DW, Klar J, Lwanga SK (1990) Adequacy of sample size in health studies. Wiley, Chichester
Levy PS, Lemeshow S (1999) Sampling of populations: methods and applications, 3rd edn. Wiley, New York
Louis TA (1981) Confidence intervals for a binomial parameter after observing no successes. The American Statistician 35:154
Machin D, Campbell MJ (1987) Statistical tables for design of clinical trials. Black-well Scientific Publications, Oxford
Machin D, Campbell M, Fayers P, Pinol A (1997) Sample size tables for clinical studies. 2nd edn. Malden and Carlton: Blackwell Science, London
Moser BK, Stevens GR, Watts CL (1989) The two-sample t test versus Satterthwaite’s approximate F test. Commun. Statist.-Theory Meth. 18:3963–3975
Muller KE, Barton CN (1989) Approximate power for repeated-measures ANOVA lacking sphericity. Journal of the American Statistical Association 84:549–555
Noether GE (1987) Sample size determination for some common nonparametric tests. Journal of the American Statistical Association 82:645–647
O’Brien RG, Muller KE (1983) Applied analysis of variance in behavioral science. Marcel Dekker, New York, pp 297–344
Peduzzi PN, Concato J, Kemper E, Holford TR, Feinstein A (1996) A simulation study of the number of events per variable in logistic regression analysis. Journal of Clinical Epidemiology 99:1373–1379
Rosner B (2000) Fundamentals of Biostatistics. 5th edn. Duxbury Press, Boston
Whitemore AS (1981) Sample size for logistic regression with small response probability. Journal of the American Statistical Association 76:27–32
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2005 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Elashoff, J.D., Lemeshow, S. (2005). Sample Size Determination in Epidemiologic Studies. In: Ahrens, W., Pigeot, I. (eds) Handbook of Epidemiology. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-26577-1_15
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-26577-1_15
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-00566-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-26577-1
eBook Packages: Mathematics and StatisticsMathematics and Statistics (R0)