11/16/13 Bias and precision | Cochrane Students' Journal Club

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Bias and precision

published by csjcadmin on Wed, 06/19/2013 - 16:35

The following phenomena is known to produce misleading results:Fraud occurs when a researcher deliberately manipulates his results. Bias occurs unintentionally due to a study being poorly designed or conducted. Confounding is a particular type of bias which occurs when comparing two groups which are different in more ways than one. Bias is one of the phenomena by which the results of a study tends to produce misleading results or deviations from the truth. For example: If you were asked to bring a variety of sweets from the bakery, and you like Chocolate very much. While selecting you will have a tendancy to pick more chocolate sweets in comparison to non chocolate ones. Because of this the person who sent you to buy sweets may wrongly consider that the bakery has more Chocolate sweets. Then what is imprecision? Bias is different from precision. Precision is commonly represented as P-values (Probability of chance) or Confidence intervals(clinical significance). In the above example, imprecision would be like choosing from all the sweets, but never getting their relative percentages correct. If your measurement was imprecise, doing it several times and averaging or increasing the sample size, will allow you to reduce the imprecision. While, if you are biased, you will always get a wrong result, irrespective of the sample size or the number of times you repeat it. Lets look at another analogy, you were throwing darts and you wanted to hit the bulls eye. You make several attempts and these are the possible results. If your result is like the top left picture, you have a very good aim and you have reached your target properly, or in other words you are unbiased and precise. If your result was like the bottom-right picture. You clearly dont have a good enough aim, or in other words you have both bias and imprecision. However your results most often will be like the top-right or bottom-left: On the top-right picture, your aim is pretty good, because you manage to throw consistently to the same area, but all your throws are also consistently away from the target in a particular direction. This is an example of bias But the bottom left picture is quite different, his aim too is okay since he has managed to hit near the Centre but not quite reaching it.

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11/16/13 Bias and precision | Cochrane Students' Journal Club

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That was helpful.. thank you.
Permalink Submitted by Geethu on Mon, 07/01/2013 - 21:28.

That was helpful.. thank you.. :) like the last example too.. Log in or register to post comments

Disclaimer: The Cochrane Students' Journal Club is a pilot project exploring ways to introduce trainee medical professionals to Evidence Informed practice. The case scenarios used here are hypothetical, and are adapted to Systematic Review questions for the purpose of demonstration. The discussions/conclusions are not intended to reflect actual evidence based decisions/conclusions or provide medical advice. Powered by Drupal Copyright Cochrane Students Journal Club : The Forum for Medical Students' Research(INFORMER). All rights reserved.

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