Performing a 2x2 Test for Association

A very common analysis in clinical trials involves the analysis of two binomial variables to see if there is a statistically significant association between them. A binomial variable is one that can have only one of two values. For example, let s assume that we have a variable called treatment whose value is either a 1 to indicate active drug therapy or a 0 to indicate placebo. We also have a variable called headache whose value is a 1 if the patient experiences headache after therapy and a 0 if not. What we want to know is whether a change in the level of therapy is significantly associated with a change in the level of headache. The 2x2 table looks like this  

If the normal approximation to the binomial distribution is valid (that is, not more than 20% of expected cell counts are less than 5) for drug therapy and symptom of headache, then you can use the Pearson chi-square test to test for a difference in proportions. To get the Pearson chi-square / -value for the preceding 2x2 table, you run SAS code like the following  

The output data set pvalue includes a variable called P PCHI that contains the Pearson chi-square p-value you need. 

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