Strengths and weaknesses
The strengths and weaknesses of case-control studies are summarised below. Click each heading to find out more.
- Usually cheap and quick to conduct
- Ethically safe
- Good for studying diseases with long latency periods
- Efficient for the study of rare diseases
- Good to examine multiple exposures
- Particularly prone to bias; especially selection, recall and observer bias
- Limited to examining one outcome
- Unable to estimate incidence rates of disease (unless study is population based)
- Poor choice for study of rare exposures
- Can examine associations but cannot establish causality
- Non-response may lead to biased results