Carefully consider the following questions. Write down your answers (1 - 2 paragraphs) for question # 1 within a word document and submit your answers to your seminar leader. Be prepared to discuss all questions during the seminar section.

1. What are some strategies in the study design and data collection phase to minimize misclassification?
2. Often in case-control studies, cases are recruited from a specific hospital and controls are selected from individuals without the outcome of interest admitted to the same hospital. Discuss some of the strengths and limitations of using hospital controls in case-control studies. Would using friend controls (i.e., asking the cases to nominate a friend to serve as a control) be a more appropriate choice than hospital controls?
3. In the study of pesticide use and breast cancer, researchers evaluated pesticide use during the entire life of the respondents. How would you expect the results to have been affected if the researchers collected exposure history spanning the previous 20 years only?

Questions for the Intellectually Curious:

Think about what you know about p-values and 95% confidence intervals. A traditional interpretation of a 95% confidence interval is that "we are 95% confident that the true effect estimates lies within these bounds." Do 95% confidence intervals incorporate any information about bias and misclassification?