Hello all I work for an organisation that receives counts of all 'notifable' diseases from around NZ.
I would like to compare this years figures with last years and in the past we have used the Mantel-Haenszel chi-square test to test if there has been a linear relationship between years (thus indicating a change). However we have a problem with this test when cell counts are small. But my question is Should I even be using this test at all - to my mind we are using population data so any differences are real and therefore significant. We do have non-sampling error in our estimates (e.g. people who do not go to a doctor, some diseases are not always recorded because of the number of cases received e.g. campy in Auckland) but I do not believe that we have a good handle on the size of this error and it may be similar from year to year. Thanks for your time Regards Michael . . ================================================================= Instructions for joining and leaving this list, remarks about the problem of INAPPROPRIATE MESSAGES, and archives are available at: . http://jse.stat.ncsu.edu/ . =================================================================
