In a case-referent study, cases of disease are compared to noncases with respect to their antecedent exposure to a treatment in an effort to determine whether exposure causes some cases of the disease. Because exposure is not randomly assigned in the population, as it would be if the population...

Clustered treatment assignment occurs when individuals are grouped into clusters prior to treatment and whole clusters, not individuals, are assigned to treatment or control. In randomized trials, clustered assignments may be required because the treatment must be applied to all children in a...

In an observational study of treatment effects, subjects are not randomly assigned to treatment or control, so differing outcomes in treated and control groups may reflect a bias from nonrandom assignment rather than a treatment effect. After adjusting for measured pretreatment covariates,...