THE PARTIAL QUESTIONNAIRE DESIGN FOR CASE-CONTROL STUDIES

We propose an alternative to a long questionnaire that may increase quality while reducing the cost and effort of participants and researchers. In the 'partial questionnaire design', information about the exposure of interest is obtained from all subjects, while zero, one, or more disjoint subsets of questions about possible confounders are asked to randomly selected subgroups. The proposed analyses exploit the fact that the uncollected data can be considered to be missing at random. We show that it is possible to obtain high efficiency for estimating the effect of exposure of interest, adjusted for confounding, while substantially shortening average questionnaire length.