Estimation of Variance in Crossover Designs

SUMMARY There is concern that the usual analysis of crossover designs with more than two treatments is subject to bias due to correlations between the measurements on the same experimental units. It has been shown by Kunert in the special case of balanced Latin squares that this bias can be present but that it is limited. Extending the work of Kunert we show in the present paper that there is a constant X* which guarantees that the estimate for the variance of any treatment contrast from the usual model multiplied by X* has an expectation which is at least as big as the true variance. This result holds for any within-unit covariance structure and it is valid for a class of commonly applied designs, allowing for fewer periods than treatments. The constant X* depends on the number of units, periods and treatments but not on the data or the unknown covariance matrix. We also deal with the effect that our result can have on tests for hypotheses about treatment contrasts.