Reply
Wed 31 Jul, 2013 11:11 am
Please verify my statistical thinking:
Hypothesis:
Significantly more nursing homes nationwide accept patients with NG tubes than in local city
Pilot data indicates that 22% of nursing homes (n=93) in local city accept NG tubes, while 60% (of a pilot, n=15) of nursing homes outside of local city accept NG tubes.
I used a one-tailed Fisher's exact test of proportions for two independent groups, with an alpha of 0.05 and it tells me we need a sample of about 80 total (40 from local city and 40 nationwide) to detect a difference at .95 power. I checked this on a different online calculator for for chi squared power with a similar result.
Based on this calculation, I suggest that we randomly sample 80-100 nursing homes around the nation (outside of local city) to call and ask about NG tube policies. I think oversampling is important in this case as 11/26 of the nursing homes contacted during the pilot did not answer.