we develop a two phase sampling procedure to determine the sample size necessary to estimatethe population mean of a normally distributed random variable and show that the resulting estimator has preassigned variance and is unbiased under a regular condition. we present a necessary and sufficient condition under which the final sample mean is an unbiased estimator for the population mean.

Phenotype misclassification in genetic studies can decrease the power to detect association between a disease locus and a marker locus. To date, studies of misclassification have focused primarily on case-control designs. The purpose of this work is to quantify the effects of phenotype misclassification on the transmission disequilibrium test (TDT) applied to affected child trios, where both pa...

Scientists who use animals in research must justify the number of animals to be used, and committees that review proposals to use animals in research must review this justification to ensure the appropriateness of the number of animals to be used. This article discusses when the number of animals to be used can best be estimated from previous experience and when a simple power and sample size c...

One of the questions most frequently asked of a statistician is: how big should the sample be? Managers are anxious to obtain an answer to this fundamental question during the planning phase of the survey since it impacts directly on operational considerations such as the number of interviewers required. There is no magical solution and no perfect recipe for determining sample size. It is rathe...