Stepped wedge cluster randomized trials are often analysed using linear mixed effects models that may include random effects for cluster, time and/or treatment. We investigate the impact of misspecification of the random effects structure of the model. Specifically, we considered two cases of misspecification of the random effects in a cross-sectional stepped wedge cluster randomized trials model - fit a linear mixed effects model with random time effects but the true model includes random treatment effects (case 1) or fit a linear mixed effects model with random treatment effect but the true model includes random time effects (case 2) - and derived the variance of the estimated treatment effect under misspecification. We defined two measures of the effect of misspecification: validity and efficiency. Validity is the ratio of the model-based variance of the treatment effect from the mis-specified model divided by the true variance of the treatment effect from the mis-specified model (based on a sandwich estimate of the variance). Efficiency is the ratio of the model-based variance of the treatment effect from the correctly specified model divided by the true variance of the treatment effect from the mis-specified model. We found that validity is less than 1.0 (anti-conservative) in almost all situations investigated with the exception of case 1 with two sequences, when validity could be greater than 1.0. Efficiency is less than 1 in all cases and depends on the intracluster correlation coefficient, the relative magnitude of the variance of the misclassified variance component, and the number of sequences. In general, there is no universal recommendation as to the most robust approach except for the case of a classic stepped wedge cluster randomized trial with only 2 sequences, where fitting a random time model is less likely to lead to anti-conservative inference compared with fitting a random intervention model.
Keywords: Stepped wedge; model misspecification; model selection; random effects; variance estimation.