Abstract
The convention in epidemiology and biostatistics is to divide the study of mismeasured variables into the areas of measurement error for continuous variables and misclassification for categorical variables. Although the topics overlap considerably, chapter Measurement Error of this handbook focuses on measurement error, whereas the present chapter is devoted to misclassification. As a motivating example of a misclassified variable in an epidemiological study, say that a binary exposure is ascertained via subject self-report on a questionnaire. Given human memory limitations, we would usually expect a portion of responses to be erroneous. For instance, in the study of Kraus et al. (1989) on possible association between maternal antibiotic use during pregnancy and sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), antibiotic use is self-reported by subjects via questionnaire. Examination of medical records of some subjects, however, indicates that the questionnaire responses are erroneous for some subjects. Thus, antibiotic use as determined via questionnaire is subject to misclassification. Moreover, this misclassification has implications when the association between antibiotic use and SIDS is inferred.
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Gustafson, P., Greenland, S. (2014). Misclassification. In: Ahrens, W., Pigeot, I. (eds) Handbook of Epidemiology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-09834-0_58
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-09834-0_58
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