Re: st: Using -sampsi- for clustered observations

[Steven Samuels <sjhsamuels@earthlink.net>]

--

Ted, the answer depends on the purpose of your study: descriptive,  
comparative?  What is being compared o?  Will the factor defining the  
comparisons (age, exposure) differ between families, between  
individuals in the same familie, both? Are you interested in  
comparing means or comparing slopes/ changes  in the repeated  
measurements?  Do you have choices on the number of people to take  
within families, or, do you have to take all eligible? Is the number  
of repeated measurements related to the outcome (e.g. censored  
because of worsening condition). Do you plan on multilevel modeling,  
or do you just need to adjust standard errors for family differences?

Of other concerns--how were the families selected? Did you identify  
eligible subjects according to some criterion and then take their  
families? Or was there recruitment (hopefully random sampling!) of  
families.

I don't think that there is a general answer to your question, and  
simulation might be the best approach.

In any case, the Joanne Garrett's -sampclus- ("search sampclus, all")  
and the accompanying paper(http://econpapers.repec.org/article/ 
tsjstbull/y_3A2001_3Av_3A10_3Ai_3A60_3Asxd4.htm) may help.

-Steve

On Feb 27, 2009, at 4:40 PM, Ted White wrote:

> Hi, all. I need to do a power calculation for a study that will  
> contain two levels of clustering; there will be repeat dichotomous  
> outcomes for individuals who will be clustered within families.  
> While the documentation shows to use post() to specify the number  
> of repeat outcomes in a dataset, I'm left with two questions:
>
> 1) What if the number of repeat observations will vary by  
> respondent? I have a postulated distribution for the number of  
> observations that will take place.
>
> 2) How to handle nesting by family in the power calculation?
>
> If this isn't handled by -sampsi- it seems that I could do a series  
> of simulations. But I'd feel pretty silly doing that if there's a  
> simpler method that I don't know about.
>
> Thanks!
>
> Ted White
> Yale University Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS
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