I would like to start a new study on measuring the disease burden of children in a tertiary care hospital. I will collect information from all admitted children in this hospital using a predefined Questionaire. In this regards, how I will calculate the sample size and show in the protocol.
Dear Sir you have mentioned that you will collect information from all admitted children in this hospital. You have not mentioned the average IPD of the hospital on daily basis and what will the the duration of your study. Keep both these factors under consideration while calculating sample size.
Regards
Sample size calculation is not always mandatory. You can provide a time frame for your study as you are taking all the admitted patients in that hospital. Just mention the time frame of data collection of your study and describe how will you be interviewing the participants.
I agree with Shakil. If you are studying a defined population over a defined period primarily as a description of that population that traditional approaches to sample size calculation are largely redundant. It is a good idea to estimate what your sample will be based upon what you know about current admission rates and you can potentially determine the likely precision of your estimates - as an example if the proportion with burden x in a population is y you can easily determine the confidence interval for the estimate of y given a sample of z. This you can adjust the period of time you will collect data to ensure that you can achieve the desired degree of precision or else simply demonstrate the degree of precision that is achieved with a given sample. A similar maneuver can be used to determine the precision of a measured quantity but you will need an estimate of the standard deviation to do so - the confidence interval is approximated by mean +/- 1.96 se for larger samples. Pretty much any text that addresses the calculation of confidence intervals should give further guidance. Try g-power software
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