Abstract
Sampling from medical records is a classical technique in medical and epidemiologic research. Let us look at a fictitious example. Suppose Dr. Q. wants to find the frequency of a risk factor A among all patients who were treated in a given ward of his hospital during the period 2000–2009. There had been N=9,850 such patients, and for every one of them a medical record in the form of a file exists where the presence or absence of A is recorded. Dr. Q. could look through the whole (dust covered) set of files and count the occurrence of A in it. Suppose that he finds it 271 times; this would be the “frequency” he is looking for.
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© 2012 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC
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Krickeberg, K., Pham, V.T., Pham, T.M.H. (2012). The Origin of Information: Sampling. In: Epidemiology. Statistics for Biology and Health. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-1205-2_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-1205-2_12
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Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY
Print ISBN: 978-1-4614-1204-5
Online ISBN: 978-1-4614-1205-2
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